Finally, there are the annual celebrations and fairs, which are always of interest to the outsider, for they help dramatize the particular region where they are held and its historical background. July and August are the months for these celebrations, and notices of coming events will be found posted prominently’ along the tourist routes. Four such outstanding occasions are Black Hills Range Days at Rapid City, Gold Discovery Days at Custer, the Belle Fourche Round-Up, and the Days of ’76 at Deadwood. The Deadwood celebration, it might be added, celebrates not the Revolutionary War, but the discovery of gold in Deadwood Gulch in 1876. CHAPTER FOUR History I: Indians and Gold Gold, they say, is where you find it. In California in 1848—in Montana in 1852—in Colorado in 1858—in Arizona, in Nevada: when they finally found it in the Black Hills in 1874, the Gold Rush West had nearly all been settled and the bonanza days were forever gone, for all the likely places had been searched. The question posed is an obvious one. With sourdoughs plowing and digging up the bed of every stream and rivulet in the West from 1849 on, how did it come about that the Black Hills, lying a considerable distance closer to home than California and the other gold rush regions, had kept their glittering secret until so late? The truth of the matter is that the mysterious and brooding dark mountain-land was a good place to hide secrets. Gold had been discovered there, as a matter of fact, as early as 1834, which was just seven years after the country’s first gold strike—the 1827 Georgia rush. But unfortunately those first lucky gold-seekers—there were six of them—did not live to enjoy their taste of the Black Hills’ incredible wealth. Fifty-three years later, not far from the town of Spearfish, one Louis Thoen found a piece of limestone upon which was crudely but legibly engraved this melancholy message: came to these hills in 1833, seven of us DeLacompt Ezra Kind G. W. Wood T Brown R Kent WM King Indian Crow All ded but me Ezra Kind Killed by Indians beyond the high hill got our gold june 1834 On the back of this somber relic were the blunt words: “Got all gold we could carry.”