Local Black Hills hikers, and many visitors, are familiar with the Flume Trail, which follows the bed of the old Rockerville Flume. The Black Hills Placer and Mining Company built the flume to carry water from Spring Creek near present-day Sheridan Lake to the Rockerville placer mines. An ambitious project, the flume carried water nearly twenty miles, through two tunnels and across many a gulch or draw.
Work began in the late 1870's, ran into problems with reputed embezzlement, and shut down in 1885. A bit of trivia: author and journalist Ambrose Bierce briefly managed the project.
The Flume Trail acquaints hikers with Black Hills natural beauty as well as the history of resource extraction. Flumes testify to nineteenth century working class can-do, but also a reminder that within a few short years after the US government reneged on its Fort Laramie treaty obligations, the sacred Black Hills had become a busy, noisy place as various mining and logging outfits invested in large-scale, but temporary, infrastructure to move resources to market.
If Chairman Mao had been in charge of Black Hills placer mining operations, he might have said, "Let a hundred showers flume." Throughout the Hills there were countless large and small-scale attempts to capitalize on the fruits of the forest, some more successful than others. Due to its size, the Rockerville Flume hogged much of the attention.
There were others. Some have probably been completely lost to time. Others have left traces in books or online, and physically in their flume beds.
Old newspaper articles mention a Battle Creek Flume supplying water to the Hayward mining camp. The Little Spearfish Flume was intended to deliver placer water from Little Spearfish Creek near Roughlock Falls to a point three miles north. The project failed like many others.
The Slate Creek Flume was unique in that it deployed a V-shaped design and used water as the conveyance for delivering logs from the Slate Creek Dam to a depot on a narrow gauge rail line operated by the Warren Lamb Lumber Company. The flume was another miss. Apparently, Slate Creek did not provide a sufficient water supply. The best remaining evidence of the Slate Creek Flume is located on the #40 Deerfield Trail just west of Flannigan Cabin. Known to some as the "Miner's Motel," because at some point some enterprising sleepers installed a rustic bunk bed, the tunnel blasted through an (approximately) twelve foot wall of rock is a cavity aching in the eyetooth that guides man's beaver-like relationship to the tree world.
Near present-day Pactola Lake, two flumes tapped into a more reliable water source, Rapid Creek. Built by the Dakota-Placerville Gold Mining Company, these flumes were quite large, "eight feet across and four feet deep," said the Rapid City Journal in 1908, "sufficiently large to carry all the water of Rapid Creek in the low water season." Near the Rapid Creek trailhead of the Centennial Trail, across Highway 385 from the reservoir, one can spot rail beds and flume beds where the Crouch Line and the flume crossed the creek. Apparently the flume crossed above the rail bridge. Fortunately, no line of sea monkey-filled open-top hoppers crossed beneath a leaky flume.
Much of the flume bed was trenched over six feet deep into the surrounding earth, and is littered with milled lumber -- remnants of the the flume itself -- so generally easy to follow, occasionally intertwining with the old Silver Arrow trail. At creek crossings and gulches, foundations of trestles linger. Gullies and tailings piles are telltales of places where placer water was directed in the hunt for gold.
Now small bands of forest history buffs hunt with the determination of a Yukon Cornelius for the mouldering remains of the flumes themselves.