The Towns They Built

Like all history's gold rushes,  the Black Hills of Dakota had its popular "mining towns" full of anything but upstanding citizens.  In fact, the level of "no-gooders" in the Black Hills was so bad that local newspapers reported that the "number of recent boozy individuals in town could be none other than those Black Hills folks".

Cheyenne became a regional flophouse legend of it's own and is even immortalized in a ballad, popular during that time:

"The roundhouse of Cheyene is filled every night,
with loafers and bummers of most every plight,
On their backs are no clothes, in their pockets, no bills...
Each day they keep starting for the dreary Black Hills."

Cheyenne was known as a gambling establishment where legend says that George Devol, a Mississippi sharper known as the"Gold Room Dealer",  tried to cheat Wild Bill Hickok.  Bill demanded his losses back, wrecked the place and robbed the cash drawer before leaving the town.

Along with Laramie and Cheyene, other towns became starting points to the diggings, where gold rushers would stop to sleep and drink, rarely bragging about their promised finds of gold.  Next time....