"At Metropolitan Saloon, Deadwood City."

Thus read a notice posted up against a big pine tree, three miles
above Custer City, on the banks of French creek. It was a large
placard tacked up in plain view of all passers-by who took the route
north through Custer gulch in order to reach the infant city of the
Northwest--Deadwood.

Deadwood! the scene of the most astonishing bustle and activity, this
year (1877.) The place where men are literally made rich and poor in
one day and night. Prior to 1877 the Black Hills have been for a
greater part undeveloped, but now, what a change! In Deadwood
districts every foot of available ground has been "claimed" and staked
out; the population has increased from fifteen to more than
twenty-five hundred souls.

The streets are swarming with constantly arriving new-comers; the
stores and saloons are literally crammed at all hours; dance-houses
and can-can dens exist; hundreds of eager, expectant, and hopeful
miners are working in the mines, and the harvest reaped by them is not
at all discouraging. All along the gulch are strung a profusion of
cabins, tents and shanties, making Deadwood in reality a town of a
dozen miles in length, though some enterprising individual has paired
off a couple more infant cities above Deadwood proper, named
respectively Elizabeth City and Ten Strike. The quartz formation in
these neighborhoods is something extraordinary, and from late reports,
under vigorous and earnest development are yielding beyond the most
sanguine expectation.