The secret held for only a few months. Trappers, prospectors, and mere travelers were passing through the spruce trails of the Hills in such profusion that sooner or later the activity up Deadwood Gulch, as it came to be called, was bound to be observed. Pearson had found his dream cache in December of 1875, and he managed to contain the secret only until March of 1876. Like a forest fire the news of the strike to the north spread, and by May the southern Hills were deserted. Custer, for several years the metropolis of the entire region, lost all except thirty of its citizens in a matter of weeks, and other settlements in the south and west simply dried up and disappeared. That Deadwood Gulch, so named for the stand of burned-over timber which graced its declivitous sides, contained a major deposit was not to be denied. The rich sands which Pearson had spaded up testified to that, and later comers were by no means disappointed. But the names and locations of individual early discoveries have long been lost to all save the most assiduous researchers, for there was one claim which outshone all the rest. That digging was the mighty Homestake, which, from its first days, has produced gold and assorted other precious ores in such abundance and with such dependability that it has been accepted the world over as one of earth’s great mines, rivaled in munificence only by the Portland-Independence of Cripple Creek in Colorado and the fabulous workings of the Witwatersrand of South Africa. As with all rich diggings, an appropriate legend attends the account of the original discovery of the Homestake. It seems there were two brothers, Fred and Moses Manuel, who had long been addicted to that most vicious of all unbreakable habits—gold prospecting. Moses had wound his weary way through the West for a full quarter of a century, plodding the dusty California gold gulches in ’50, up the steep heights of Virginia City in ’60, into Old Mexico, and—although he was a full generation too early—into Alaska. But now, in 1875, he was through with it all and was going home. Collecting his brother Fred, who was fruitlessly panning the sands of the Last Chance Gulch in the high border country of Montana, Moses started east, passing of course through the Black Hills, to scout down this one last ray of rumor—that a new strike was in the making. Setting out their camp in Bobtail Gulch, a mere pistol shot from certain placer claims in Deadwood Gulch, they went to work in midwinter, hoping to find, the legend has it, just enough blossom rock to give them a stake for their homeward journey.