Wagon Trains to Deadwood

Bull Train Up Staged by Plumber


Been Gone/Back Again
"Going Home" never means exactly that. It is putting our feet on the soil of West River South Dakota. We did precisely that last week.

The culmination of the event, besides visiting a grown son and daughter, In-Laws, friends and a cousin, we situated our lawn chairs across the street from the famed Franklin Hotel in Deadwood and watched the wagon trains from Cheyenne, Sidney and Ft. Pierre meet in the street in front of the hotel with yippies, excited yells, and some speeches from wagon masters and city mayors. MC-ing the event was a nephew of a friend.

I couldn't figure out how to get these videos here but they are both well worth watching. One is from Fort Meade on the way to Deadwood and the other in Deadwood.

http://videos.rapidcityjournal.com/p/video?id=2078950

http://videos.rapidcityjournal.com/p/video?id=2083513

The event had not happened for the last hundred years. As the locomotive replaced the horse and wagon in that area, goods came by rail instead of wheel and it connected our pioneers and homesteaders with places outside of this hinterland, as one of my college professors called it, when I went away to school in 1953.