On Sunday, September 13, David Wolff will discuss town founding during the gold rush. Not everyone who came to the Black Hills 150 years ago wanted to dig gold. Some hoped to profit by establishing towns, and several small camps soon appeared. This talk will explore the town founders’ motivations, the types of towns they created, and why some towns survived and others died. A town’s survival, however, did not guarantee long-term prosperity, and declining fortunes often forced town promoters to diversify their community’s economy.
Wolff will also review how the towns changed over the first 50 years of their existence. A number of Black Hills locations will be discussed, including Custer, Deadwood, Lead, Spearfish, and Rapid City.
Date: Sunday, September 13
Time: 2:00 p.m.
This event is free to attend, no RSVP required.
David A. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at Black Hills State University where he specialized in South Dakota and Black Hills history and served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. Wolff received a Ph.D. from Arizona State University, and has written five books on Black Hills history. Two of them are biographies of Deadwood businessmen, Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman and The Savior of Deadwood: James K. P. Miller on the Gold Frontier. Three of the books are part of the Black Hills History Tour series published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press: The Gold Rush, The Gateway to the Hills: Rapid City and the Central Black Hills, and On the Narrow Gauge: The Homestake and Northern Black Hills. Wolff is a member of several local and regional historical societies and serves as chair of Deadwood’s Adams Museum & House Board of Directors. He has received a number of awards, including Black Hills State University’s Distinguished Faculty Member Award, the Robinson Lifetime Achievement Award from the South Dakota State Historical Society, and the Rodman Paul Award for Outstanding Contributions to Mining History.