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Try as government forces might, it was impossible to turn back and eject the determined masses clawing and clamoring for gold. After Custer’s 1874 expedition, this presence of United States citizens in the Black Hills became a problem for the federal government. Everyone traveling to the Black Hills, and those already in the Black Hills, were trespassing on a sovereign nation’s land and illegally removing its resources. The Black Hills, and the land over which the miners and other settlers had to travel, did not belong to the United States. But the Laramie Treaty soon became a problem. Five years later, the area’s population would be around twenty thousand, according to the Black Hills Daily Times on February 23, 1884. Between November 15, 1875, and March 1, 1876, an estimated ten thousand people arrived in the eight thousand square miles of the Black Hills. It was a lawless place a gun was judge and jury. Most dream-seekers headed for Deadwood, the spinning hub of the golden excitement the famous town grew to a population of five thousand almost overnight.
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Information about the overland travel routes was penciled in, and trips were sketched out on the fragile map from the Inter-Ocean News. Rifles were cleaned and pistols were holstered. Mining and camping equipment-mostly placer pans, shovels, and pickaxes-was gathered up. After weeks on the harsh prairie of the Sioux, the exhausted convoys appeared out of the prairie dust, each team of twenty or more oxen pulling sturdy, white-bonneted wagons filled with provisions. The bulls, thousands of them in mile-long, meandering trains, had last known civilization in Fort Pierre, two hundred miles to the east. Those men and supplies traveled on bull trains. In April 1877, the newspaper reported, “The Dakota Central brought three coaches containing two hundred Black Hillers.” Two days later, the same newspaper reported, “About four hundred men arrived on last night’s train from Sioux City, mostly for the Black Hills.” In its March 5 edition, the newspaper reported, “Thirty men from Dubuque will arrive this week en route to the Black Hills.” Instead, this “train” was a long line of wagons pulled by oxen, one of thousands of bull trains that would haul miners, settlers and ne’er-do-wells needed to survive in that isolated prairie oasis. That technology had not yet reached this part of the future state. The party is well-outfitted and well-armed.” But the train in question wasn’t powered by steam, and it didn’t follow tracks. The train will consist of some ten or fifteen wagons. A party from Wisconsin will also leave today and join the Yankton party. In 1876, years before South Dakota would become a state, The Yankton Press and Dakotian reported that “A large party will leave Yankton for the Black Hills.