Stagecoaches Between Rapid City and the Deadwood Diggings
Before there were rails, there were teams. In the years after 1876, the only way to move people and goods through the Black Hills was by wagon and coach over rough roads that were little more than improved trails. Rapid City, laid out on the eastern edge of the Hills as a supply town, owed much of its early life to that traffic. The freight that fed the gold camps and the passengers bound for the diggings passed through, and the business of hauling them was one of the steadier ways to make money in a country where most fortunes were imaginary.
The great prize to the north was Deadwood, the boomtown in the northern gulches where the richest strikes had drawn a flood of miners. The route between the new settlement on Rapid Creek and the Deadwood country ran up through the Hills over grades that taxed both animals and drivers. Heavy freight wagons, often pulled by long strings of oxen or mules, carried the bulk of the trade, the flour and bacon and mining tools and lumber that a camp consumes faster than it can produce. Lighter, faster coaches carried passengers, mail, and the small valuable cargo that could not wait behind a slow ox team.
The men and animals of the road
Freighting was hard, deliberate work. A bull train of oxen moved at a walking pace, and a single trip could take days, the teamster sleeping under the wagon and nursing his animals over the worst of the grades. Mule outfits moved faster but cost more to keep. The drivers were a distinct breed, profane and weathered, and a good one who knew the road and could keep his stock alive was worth a great deal to the men who owned the wagons.
The coaches were a different operation, run on something closer to a schedule. Stage lines maintained stations along the route where teams could be swapped for fresh ones, so that a coach could keep moving while tired horses rested and recovered. A traveler bound for the goldfields might endure a jolting, dusty, bone-rattling ride packed in with strangers and luggage, but the stage got him there in a fraction of the time a freight wagon would take.
Robbers and risk
The most valuable cargo on the road was gold moving out of the camps, and where gold moved, road agents followed. The treasure coaches that carried bullion and dust down out of the Hills were a standing temptation, and holdups were a real hazard on the more isolated stretches. Express companies responded by sending armed guards along with the strongboxes, and some outfits ran specially reinforced coaches meant to frustrate robbers. The stories of those holdups, embroidered over the years, became part of the romance of the era, though for the people actually riding the coaches the danger was less romantic than nerve-wracking.
Weather was the other constant enemy. The Hills roads turned to mud in the spring melt and the summer storms, and winter could shut them down entirely or make a crossing a gamble with frostbite and stranding. A schedule on paper meant little against a washed-out grade or a blizzard.
The end of the coaching era
The stage and freight business was, by its nature, a stopgap. Everyone understood that the country needed a railroad, and that whenever the rails arrived, the wagons and coaches would lose the through traffic that sustained them. That is more or less what happened. When the railroad reached Rapid City in the mid-1880s, the long-haul freight that had crawled across the plains by wagon shifted to the cars, and the role of the teams shrank to the shorter runs that the rails did not yet reach.
The coaching era left its mark on the region all the same. It established the routes that later roads would follow, it fixed Rapid City’s identity as a forwarding and supply point rather than a mining camp, and it knit the scattered settlements of the Hills into something like a connected economy. The town that had bet on commerce rather than gold did well out of the wagon trade, and the habits of a transportation hub that began with the bull trains and the treasure coaches carried Rapid City forward long after the last stage rolled in.