A day in Deadwood

Welcome to Deadwood.

Today we finally made it to Deadwood, the formerly lawless town run by infamous gamblers and gunslingers.  The town we arrived in, however, has become a quaint and a beautifully reconstructed collection of gaming halls, restaurants, saloons, and hotels.  It's pretty apparent that the casinos are making money and they contribute a lot to maintain and improve the town and its community.  But we did see several cars parked along the local stream and their occupants were busy panning.

Wild Bill Hickok's place
on Boot Hill (alias Mt. Moriah
Cemetery)

Calamity Denna at
Calamity Jane's grave

We did several geocaches that involved a series hidden near the signs for Deadwood at all conceivable entrances to the town.  Of course, no visit to Deadwood is complete without visiting the final resting place for Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.  Although the original saloon in which Wild Bill was shot by Jack McCall has since burned down, the town continues to maintain a marker at that spot.

We headed up to Lead, another mining town near Deadwood, to find a Subway for a sandwich and found the Homestake mine.  It's an open pit mine that was the second largest gold producer in the U.S.  We thought Placerville had been left looking scarred by the mining, but it's nothing compared to this nearly mile-long pit. 

Tonight is our last night in the beautiful Black Hills and we're off to Nebraska tomorrow to visit our niece who is a freshman in college.  Then we'll roll on to Colorado to see our good friend, Deb, who lives near Denver.  This trip continues to be a lot of fun and we've been able to see so much of this great part of the country.