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* Strewn across the evergreenstudded slopes of the Black Hills are the crumbling remains of gold mining activity - mills, shafts, dredges, sluices, flumes, cyanide pits, assay houses and even a few schools and saloons. In Mystic, on a gravel road 12 miles north of Hill City, such ruins belie what was once a burgeoning town with cuttingedge mining technology.
* In 1874 George Armstrong Custer's 1,000-man Black Hills Expedition explored the valley that would hold Mystic, naming the stream there Castle Creek. In the summer of 1875, at the behest of the U.S. government, geologists Walter Jenney and Henry Newton led a party into the hüls and found gold on Castle Creek. The resulting rush gave rise to a camp along the creek caUed Sitting Bull. In 1879 the population of Sitting Bull was 100, though interest soon shifted to richer finds farther north at Lead and Deadwood.
* Placer mining kept the camp in business and, in 1889, prompted the construction of a station for the newly built Chicago, Burlington & Quincy RaUroad, the first Line into the Black Hüls. RaUroad officials renamed the growing town Mystic, likely after Mystic, Conn.
* The arrival of the railroad spurred further mining activity. One early...