Blood and Eden

Paha Sapa , The Black Hills, was the center of the world, the place of gods and holy mountains, where warriors went to speak to the great spirits and await visions. In 1868, the Great Father considered the hills worthless and gave them to the Indians by treaty. Four years later, white miners were violating the treaty. They invade Paha Sapa , searching for the rocky passes and clear running streams for the yellow metal that drove white men crazy - Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee On this route we circumnavigate the center of the world, starting in the Old West town of Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickock was shot in saloon poker match, past birch tree archways, through old mountain tunnels on a dedicated Rail to Trail with a detour to Crazy Horse monument. We complete most of the Mickelson Trail and veer off in the tiny one-saloon outpost of Pringle, complete with eccentric bike sculpture, before heading into Wind Cave National Park, where, according to Lakota legend, hu...

Route Overview, Maps, Reading List >> Day One - Deadwood / Lead to Hill City / Orenville Camp on the Mickelson Trail Deadwood, an old west gold rush town is famous for its connections to Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane, is the official terminus - Mile 109 - of the Mickelson Trail . You can see their gravestones and the saloon where ol' Bill was shot up in a poker match. Keep walking the hill over the cemeterery and you'll get to Sheriff Seth Bullock's grave, the man credited with finally bringing some order the lawless old west camp. Hike another short ways up the rutted, rocky trail and you'll get the top - White Rocks- a portruding, precariously stacked rock tower that you can scramble to the top of for a panoramic view of Deadwood and the surrounding hills. I do not recommmend climbing White Rocks in bike shoes, as I did. The Mickelson was once the route of the Burlington Northern train, abandoned in 1983 and converted into a gravel and crus...

To Be Explored. Sometimes I go down a rabbit hole, zooming into Google Earth. Stretched out between maps and history books, perhaps I'll never be able to trace these stories. And perhaps I will. Today's rabbit hole traces the interwining stories of three peoples - The native Nez Perce, the exploited Chinese miners, the white pioneers - through the most remote of landscapes, up a mountain pass called "The Land at Eden's Gate", down into the depth of a place literally called "Hell's Canyon", and through brush of unmaintained trails to find the places where blood was spilled in nature's majesty. 60 miles on a forest road from the tiny town of Joseph, Oregon, then an 8 mile hike through dense bramble - is the only way overland to arrive at Chinese Massacre Cove on Deep Creek in Wallowa Whitehead National Forest. It is here where 34 Chinese miners were ambushed and slaughtered for their gold in 1887. A small monument was erected in...

On my way between a steaming hotspring waterfall near Granite Creek, WY and sweeping, wind-carved Medicine Bow Peak. , I pulled over in a highway town called Rock Springs. I got fajitas in a strip mall, filled up on gas, and left. It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885 in which white rioters burned down a Chinese immigrant encampment and murdered 28 Chinese miners. It was a massacre no one ever stood trial for, and which now seems lost to history and the dust of the desert highway. This sent me down an internet search hole- how many Chinese massacres had there been in the West, in an era rife with racism and lawlessness, when railroads treated workers as expendable subhumans, and what law that existed did the same? How many had I just driven by on a route that began on the Pacific NW Coast? A lot it turns out - from the Tacoma Expulsion to The Massacre at Deep Creek, these sites of a bloody forgotten history dot the landscape of Th...