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Playbill from Ford's Theater the night Lincoln was
assassinated. |
Our time in Deadwood is now over. We leave early tomorrow morning to head back to Bismarck. This has been a really quick trip, even quicker since 12 hours was wasted in Minneapolis. But 't is life.
Anyway, it has been really cold this whole trip, and it rained all day, which made it even colder. Despite that, we had a great time.
This morning we woke up, ate breakfast, and drove down to Deadwood. Deadwood is just 12 miles or so south of Spearfish, where we are staying. We weren't sure what we wanted to do, so we stopped at the information center. We decided on the things we wanted to do during the day and set out.
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| Old fashioned fire hydrant with me and Erin. |
First we went to the Adams Museum. We didn't expect it to be as interesting as it was. It is a really tiny museum, but despite that, they have a lot jammed into it. Deadwood is technically considered a ghost town. It was big during the gold rush (getting up to 15,000 people) but dropped significantly after the gold rush died down. They turned it into a tourist attraction to save the town. So the museum went through a lot of that history. One interesting thing that we saw was a Native American breastplate that had swastika's all over it.
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| It's raining, it's pouring! |
Then we went over to the Adams' House. It was originally built by the Franklins, who sold it to their son for a dollar, who sold it to Adams. His second wife left it after Adams passed away, with all of their things in place as if she was coming back, but she never did. It was empty for 50 years until it was sold to a couple and turned into a bed and breakfast. That only lasted 6 years before the couple couldn't do it anymore and it was restored back. All of the household items were still there, so they didn't have to do much to fill it up. It was really interesting.
Next we went to lunch at Wild Bill's. The food was pretty good. They gave me free french fries because I asked if the soup was gluten free (and it wasn't). Not sure why they felt like they needed to give me free french fries, but it was nice anyway. Maybe I should do that at every restaurant :)
After lunch, we walked to Nelson's Car Museum. They had more than just cars in there, they had lots of props from different movies. It was pretty cool, and admission was free. That is my favorite kind of tourist attraction . . . FREE.
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| The Adam's Museum, from the outside of course. |
While we were walking back to where we were parked, Erin saw a leg lamp and wanted to take a picture of it. She said that she wanted to out loud. There was this older guy who then moved over. She thought he wanted to be in the picture with it, I thought maybe he was getting a picture of his own and we happened to walk through it at that moment. Anyway, then he moved over completely in front of the picture and even looked behind him to make sure he was covering it completely. At least that's how it seemed to us.
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| Erin peeking around an old brothel door. |
Our final stop for the afternoon was Broken Boot Mine. Broken Boot Mine used to be called Saim's Mine when it was an operating gold mine. The funny thing is, it was never very successful as a gold mine. In it's operating years it averaged about 1.5 oz of gold per day. But it was very productive in other minerals. It made more money off it's pyrite (aka Fools Gold) then it ever did with gold. But pyrite is used to make sulfuric acid which is used in processing real gold, so in a gold rush town, that was also an important mineral. During WWI it was mined for minerals for gunpowder. After that it was shut down, until it was reopened decades later as a tourist attraction. It has had more success and been open longer as a tourist attraction.
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Wire money from Africa. Women wore these in their
hair, too. |
We went on a tour of the mine, which was interesting. It included a demonstration of what it would have been like to work by candlelight. Then we saw what it was like in complete darkness. I'm not sure where the following information comes from, but this is what we were told. In a couple hours, you would start hallucinating, in a month you would go blind, another couple months you would lose your sense of humor, and some time after that you would lose your mind.
At the end of our tour, we panned for gold. That was pretty fun. And we got to keep the gold, though it was seeded, so we were guaranteed to get gold.
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| The Ugly Horse Pub - me and Heather being Vanna White. |
After that we came back to our hotel. We were pretty frozen by that time from walking in the wet and cold. When we got back to the hotel, we couldn't get the heater to work. Luckily the manager came and took care of that. We got dressed up in formal dresses, did our hair and then went back to Deadwood.
I caught the end of the shootout/capture of the man accused of killing Wild Bill, then met up with Heather and Erin to go to dinner. We went to a restaurant called Jake's, which is somehow connected to Kevin Costner. I think he may own it. It was pretty nice atmosphere, expensive food, and limited choices. But it was still fun. There was also live entertainment, piano music. During the night there was a guy who asked to play the piano, and ended up playing Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid. It was pretty cool. Also, while we were eating a man came up to us and said, "Excuse me, I just wanted to say that you ladies look ravishing tonight." It was a nice compliment.
That was pretty much my day. It was a good day.
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| The streets of Deadwood |
1 comment:
I LOVED our trip! Even if it was short and stuff, it was stll fabulous to be able to see you before you go to CJ!!! EVEN if we were 2 hours late ;) Love ya!
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