September 22, 2022
Today is our second trip to Deadwood. There were a couple of things that we didn’t get to on our first trip. Like before, we went to the Deadwood Visitors Center. The plan was to get trolley tickets and get off and on as we needed to. Today they only had one trolley running so the times were greatly lengthened. We opted to drive to a parking garage in downtown Deadwood. It was actually the same cost as two trolley tickets. From the parking garage we could easily walk to our destinations. Our first stop was Deadwood Harley Davidson. It was one of the five area stores for the Sturgis / Black Hills Rally. My goal was to get a poker chip from each one. I also happened to pick up a shirt or two also. As it turned out, next door to the Harley store, was the place where we picked up our bus for the Kevin Costner Deadwood Historic Tour. It was a one hour tour of Deadwood and the Mount Moriah Cemetery. It was narrated by our driver who was awesome. Some facts we had already learned from our prior visit. We drove through town with a few stops to see buildings, etc. We eventually wound up at the cemetery and we had about 10 minutes to walk up to the graves of Wild Bill Hickcock , Potato Creek Johnny, and Calamity Jane. On the route to exit the cemetery we stopped again to view the town from an awesome lookout point.
After we got back we took another walk for about three blocks to the Adams Museum. It was a collection of items the Adams Brothers collected over the years. Most dealt with Deadwood’s history. They also had the original gold nugget discovered by Potato Creek Johnny. From there we decided it was lunch time so we walked about 3 more blocks to Jacobs Brewhouse for a bite to eat. We ate our late lunch and walked back to the parking garage.
Our next stop is Kevin Costner’s Tatanka. It is a small museum -esque dedicated to the story of the bison. Kevin Costner has a connection with the Black Hills as it was the filming location for Dances With Wolves. The movie set can be seen at Fort Hayes, outside Rapid City. He purchased land outside of Deadwood to build a large luxury resort hotel with train, etc. That never materialized. It was going to be called the Dunbar Hotel, his character name in the Dances With Wolves movie. He did have large bronze statues made and set at Tatanka depicting the Native Americans in a bison (buffalo) hunt. We watched a brief video on the history of this statue and the land and then went outside to walk around the statues. It was very impressive.
The afternoon was over so we departed Deadwood and took a short ride through Lead. Not a whole lot to see, especially a little after 5:00 PM. We headed home to pick up Bree. Tonight was going to be the last night that the 6 work campers would meet at the Custer Beacon for a night of cards, fun, and drinks. Cathy and Belinda were leaving in a couple of days and followed shortly by Leslie and Bill. We closed the Beacon down one last time and said our farewells to the staff at the Beacon. We got to know them as well this summer. Our time in the Black Hills is coming to an end. It has been wonderful.
