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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
From Gold to Granite The town of Keystone, SD was established in the late 1800s at the end of the Black Hills Gold Rush era. Today, it is a tourist destination, owing to its fame to the carving of Mount Rushmore. But the town existed years before the monument was even conceived. This paper is an attempt to look at the beginnings of Keystone, how it developed, and how Mount Rushmore changed this once-booming gold rush town into the tourist town it is today. Although mining brought settlers to Keystone and helped the town to prosper, Mount Rushmore National Park has helped the town to survive. The development of Keystone could be defined in phases. The first was the initial discovery of mineral deposits, mainly gold, in the region. The discovery of gold led to a flood of prospectors – all hoping to get rich quick. Next was the establishment of the town of Keystone itself, named after the Keystone mine discovered in 1891. This second phase of development saw Keystone prosper, decline, and begin to recover. The third phase in the development of Keystone occurred during the carving of Mount Rushmore. This project had a big impact on the lives of the citizens of the town, from the establishment of electric power to the jobs it created. The fourth and current phase of Keystone is the Keystone of today – no longer a mining town, but a tourist town that prospers thanks to the carving of Mount Rushmore. The first phase was defined by the entry of prospectors into the region. Gold was first discovered in the area around present-day Keystone, SD in 1875 in Battle Creek. Miners soon started to flood the area and Harney City, named after nearby Harney Peak, was established. According to the New York Tribune, about 300 miners were working in the area that year. Annual figures for placer gold or gold panned from the streams, from the Harney area are in the millions of dollars.The first settler to the region was a man by the name of Fred J Cross who built a cabin in Buckeye Gulch in 1877. As more people came into the area, the town started to develop. On January 22, 1877, L Field Whitbeck, in a letter to the Sidney Telegraph of Sidney, Nebraska wrote, “These districts are now well-settled and new arrivals occur daily. This deletable burg, located
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