NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
July 23, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
Traveling feels best for me when I have a mission. The mission for this junket across West River South Dakota was to find out about W.H. Hamilton, known in these parts as Virginia Bill. In the 1880s and 1890s this West Virginian proved up a homestead in the Belle Fourche River Valley and then established a ranch in the South Cave Hills. He wrote a book about his life in the West called "Dakota: The Autobiography of a Cowman." The South Dakota State Historical Society was preparing to reprint the book, and I was hunting information for the new edition.
First a stop in Pierre to consult documents at the Heritage Center. Finishing up, I took a walk beside the Missouri right after a shower of rain. A stunner of a double rainbow promised success for the expedition ahead. On to Belle Fourche.
A stop at the Register of Deeds in the Butte County courthouse got me ready to go out and find Hamilton's homestead, which I knew included the present site of the village of Fruitland, some eight miles east of Belle Fourche. I was armed with Bureau of Land Management land utilization maps, the new DeLorme atlas of South Dakota, and a brand new toya little GPS (global positioning system) receiver. So it was easy to locate the claim Hamilton proved up in 1890 on the north bank of the Belle Fourche.
Next job was to find the ghost town of Minnesela, home town of Hamilton the homesteader, original seat of Butte County. Minnesela, south of the river, just about three miles southeast of Belle Fourche, has a sad story. In 1889 the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Railway, building from Deadwood toward the cattle country north of the Black Hills, reached the junction of the Belle Fourche and Redwater rivers. People in Minnesela expected the railroad to come there, but they were worried, and so they hired a fellow named Seth Bullock to negotiate with the railroad for them.
That was their mistake. Bullockcousin of Theodore Roosevelt, veteran frontier marshal, and aspiring capitalistdouble-crossed the Minneselans and struck a deal with the railroad to build into his own infant town of Belle Fourche. Within a few years Belle Fourche claimed title as the biggest cattle-shipping point in the world, and Minnesela faded. Which is why all that remains at the end of the former main drag of Minnesela is a little board sign put up by the local historical society.
By that time Hamilton had shifted his attention some 70 miles north, where he was developing the ranch in the Cave Hills. Travel to and fro was by what he called the old Dickinson freight road. I traced its route, locating the landmarks along the way, including the old post office of Macy and the grave of Isaac Macy, its proprietor. Recording coordinates as I went, I got to like doing history bouncing off satellites. There was one point on the route I particularly wanted to locate. In 1893 Virginia Bill went back east to marry his old sweetheart in West Virginia. On the trip back to the ranch, he stopped at one particular place to provide his bride, Mary Ellen Showalter Hamilton, her first view of the Cave Hills. This point on the old Dickinson road, he records, was the divide between the North Fork of the Moreau River and Clark's Fork of the Grand.
I'm sure that just west of Highway 85, I found the exact place Hamilton wrote about. Ellen Hamilton must have been impressed, for it's a sublime place. Over my left shoulder, to the west, rise the East Short Pine Hills, faces white in the sun, dark pines atop. North, across about 25 miles of prairie, the Cave Hills are a dark rim on the horizon. The only human marks on the prairie are one ranch headquarters, a few Black Angus, and here and there a windmill. To the east and west, along the face of the divide, a dozen small, steep clay buttes the color of ruddy chalk perch like haystacks. Sweet clover, sage, and history are on the south wind. Two pronghorn burst from the sagebrush slope and race off in the direction of the Cave Hills.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866