Yes, there was gold in plenty, but Paha Sapa of the Hills was a jealous spirit who guarded the forbidden portals with a great vengeance. It is interesting, though, to speculate upon how the course of western history might have veered had Ezra Kind made his way out of the bleak region to report his discovery. Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and most of the Missouri Valley would have been skipped over in a rush to the prairie West, left to be filled in and settled later. The upriver ports of the Missouri, rather than St. Louis, Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Omaha, would have been the outposts, and there would have been no Santa Fe Trail, no Platte River—Oregon Trail, but rather a heavily traveled National Road winding out from St. Paul and from Chicago. Rapid City would have been a metropolis the size of Denver, and when eventually the Union Pacific was built it would have been three hundred miles north of its present route. And the Indians? There would have been a far different story in that regard, perhaps a much bloodier and more tragic tale. But Ezra Kind was killed and his secret slept, and thus we are as we are today. Actually it was the Indians who kept the Hills so long forbidden—Indians of the Teton Sioux, the same tribe who put Ezra’s party to the tomahawk. Before the California gold rush life on the Great Plains had proceeded pretty much on an even keel. The mighty Teton Sioux, all seven tribes of them—the Oglalas, the Unkpapas, the San Arcs, the Brules, the Minniconjous, the Blackfeet, and the Two Kettle—roamed the prairies at will, from the Missouri Valley to the Rocky Mountains. Of course they had their misadventures with the fur companies, but just as often their dealings with the Mountain Men were profitable, for the Indians, when in the mood, scouted, trapped, and hunted, all for the white man’s pay. With the great exodus to California, though, the situation took on a different hue. Immigrants by the hundreds and the thousands poured up the rolling valley of the Platte, and it was not many months before the haphazard Indian attacks took on a new strength and design. Long burned the council fires in the dark nights, and all up and down the great plains the war raged. To protect the wagon trains the government sent its shrewdest and most experienced Indian agent, Thomas Fitzpatrick, a veteran fur trader since 1823, the famed “Broken Hand” of western legend. Summoning the tribes to Fort Laramie in 1851, Fitzpatrick managed to subdue them, but only by promising that he would confine the settlers to specific ranges and would keep them steadfastly out of the Dakotas and the Black Hills.