NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota
State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
July 30, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
The Cave Hills are a pair of small tablelands or large buttes standing sandstone-capped and pine-bedecked in Harding County, far northwestern South Dakota. Bull Creek divides the South Cave Hills from the North Cave Hills. Jones Creek traces the south face of the South Cave Hills. There, in 1890, trailing a herd north from Belle Fourche, W.H. "Virginia Bill" Hamilton arrived to establish a ranch. And there, in 1998, I arrived to locate the old ranch headquarters in preparation for a reprint of Hamilton's book, "Dakota: The Autobiography of a Cowman."
The Cave Hills are not well known outside the area, but they retain a sort of mystic attraction for local folk. Some of this is mythic, feeding on stories of George A. Custer's visit to Ludlow Cave in 1874 and on the petroglyphs throughout the hills. To ranchers, though, the hills also offered the concrete benefits of timber for fencing, shelter from the winter wind, and fresh spring water. The Cave Hills today are included in the Custer National Forest.
The whole country from Deadwood to Dickinson was colonized by Texas cattlemen in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Generally we date the demise of the big outfitsthe Hash Knife, the E6, the Turkey Track, and so onfrom the legendary hard winter of 1886-87. That was a bad one, but it did not wipe out the big outfits and their herds the way we like to tell it. What happened was it began a period of decline when these over-capitalized operations, mainly because of bad markets, were unable to thrive, and they gave way to smaller, family-type operations.
Like Virginia Bill Hamilton and brother Jone. They picked a headquarters site in a gulch with the south rimrock of the Cave Hills to the north and Jones Creek to the south. They fenced a couple of gaps in the rimrock to secure the north boundary joined with neighbors to fence their east and west boundaries and ran fences from one butte to another to enclose the ranch on the south. Theirs was not an open-range operation, but a fenced ranch. Every late summer they worked hard to put up plenty of hay. Now and then they traveled back east to buy Hereford bulls. When scrub bulls broke in and threatened their program of up-breeding, they either ran them off or shot them. It was a new day on the range.
I turned up Cave Hills road into the vicinity I knew the Hamilton ranch site must lie, and enjoyed the drive in. I tell you, that little white Cave Hills Lutheran Church, built by Finnish Lutherans on the west shoulder of rugged Juhala Hill, has to be a finalist for most picturesque country church on the plains.
All right, there's Jones Creek, and that gap in the Cave Hills must be McKenzie Gulch, named for the Hamilton's neighbor to the east. But how am I supposed to find the very gulch where the Hamiltons located? My maps and Global Positioning System are no good here, because I've got no legals and no coordinates to go by. Fortunately, in my experience, the farther you go off the beaten path, the more hospitable and helpful people are. I found Mary Roberts at her ranch home, and she gave good directions to the old McKenzie ranch site, which I located readily. As for the Hamilton place, she said ask Betty and Mike Butler, in the next place west.
Betty, it turns out over iced tea, is a fair country historian. Down there, she pointed, is where Virginia Bill shot Old Diamond, the pesky scrub bull. And up there, she pointed north, is the ranch headquartersMike can take you there. Which he did, up an old Forest Service track and then off it. I took coordinates at the old well on the ranch site. In the bank of the gulch were dugout remains, and on the flats above the outlines and vegetation patterns indicating where the buildings of the ranch complex stood. Up the gulch a little farther was a second site, which must have been where brother Jone built after he and Bill both married.
Hamilton moved back east to Missouri in 1901 for the sake of his children's education, but late in life he wrote one of his sons, "Had it not been to give you children a first-class education, I would never have left Dakota."
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866