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Fort Pierre to Deadwood Trail

Overland trail stretching approximately 200 miles from Fort Pierre, Dakota Territory to Deadwood and the gold fields in the Black Hills.[1]

Originally established by fur traders as access between the Black Hills and the Missouri River, it became an important thoroughfare for fortune-seekers after the Black Hills Expedition's 1874 gold discovery.[1]

The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had ceded the Black Hills and other lands in southwestern Dakota Territory to the Sioux in perpetuity, establishing the Great Sioux Reservation. In an effort to restrict white trespassing into Indian land where the Black Hills gold fields were located, the U. S. government closed the trail in early 1876. But local officials making a livelihood from the emigrant traffic protested, and the trail was reopened by that June, despite the hostile objections of the Sioux.[1]

In retaliation against the Sioux for the Great Sioux War of 1876 and the U. S. Army's defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the government felt justified in reclaiming the Black Hills and the western-most portions of the Dakota Territory back from the Sioux by ratifying the Act of February 28, 1877. The Black Hills were therefore legally opened to white settlement and the Fort Pierre to Deadwood Trail became a sanctioned road under the new treaty.[1]

Emigrants traveled up the Missouri River to Fort Pierre by horse, wagon or steamboat and from there, overland into the Black Hills. Wagon trains of all sizes would carry gold-seekers and their freight across the smaller, reorganized Sioux reservation.[1]

Stampede: In May of 1877, Bret Maverick and Dandy Jim Buckley rode the Fort Pierre to Deadwood Trail.[2] Once in the Black Hills, they met Noah Perkins felling trees along the trail, and recruited him to fight Battling Kreuger at the Golden Nugget Saloon in Deadwood at two-to-one odds.[3]