ntment of not having seen this cave during the summer visit
to the Hills grew as the weeks passed, and a request that the owner
should send a description was answered with an assurance that it was
impossible. Therefore, on Friday, November 13th, 1896, with a small
nephew, Herbert A. Owen, Jr., for company, the trip was undertaken a
second time to complete the unfinished mission.

The first glimpse of the Hills is at Edgemont in the early morning, but
the train makes its way to the north through the heart of the uplift,
twisting about the curves of the hills and clinging to the sides of a
beautiful canon whose high walls give way here and there to fine slopes
densely covered with forests of pine and spruce. These look black in the
distance and suggested the name of Black Hills to the Indians, who
always have a reason for the names they give even to their children.

There are great tracts where fire has killed part or all of the timber
but left much of it standing, while in other places nature has defied
the power of fire and the hills are re-clothed with young trees. A
recent storm had further beautified the region with a few inches of
snow, but as the day advanced a chinook began to blow so that when
Deadwood was reached, soon after noon, only the northern exposures
retained an appearance of winter.

Deadwood is a most peculiar little city and very attractive in its
peculiarity, being crowded snugly into a depression between a number of
steep pine-wooded hills, which gives an appearance suggestive of a
bird's nest securely located among the forks of a branching tree, and as
is the case in a nest, business is chiefly transacted at the lowest
depth of the enclosure. As the busy center of a great gold-mining
region, the metropolis of the Hills, and the outgrowth of an exciting
historical past, it claims and receives interesting attention. And while
the whole Black Hills region is still distinctly a man's country, it
is called woman's paradise, and surely nowhere else are the daughters of
Eve received with a more gracious courtesy or surrounded by an equally
unobtrusive protecting care.

[Illustration: Approaching Deadwood. Page 176.]

The streets leading up to the residences lack very little of standing on
end, and the houses appear to have been hung in place by means of hooks
and wire cord like pictures on a wall. The smelter has no reception day
but admits visitors as if their pleasure were a guarantee of profit.