When:

September 27, 2008
Saturday 8:00pm

Website:

Event Website

Detail:

In fall 2006, a new exhibit rolled into the Eiteljorg Museum. Its centerpiece is a real Concord stagecoach that guests can board for a “journey” from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Visitors can don period clothing, take a seat on the museum’s nine passenger stagecoach and learn who their fellow travelers might be at a computer interactives kiosk featuring personal accounts and other details.

The museum’s new coach was made by the Hansen Wheel & Wagon Shop in Letcher, South Dakota, and is a reproduction of the great Concord stagecoaches manufactured first in 1827 by Abbot Downing Co. in Concord, New Hampshire. The stagecoach represented the highest achievements in design for horse-drawn transportation and includes many features that made it a flexible and reliable vehicle. It was well-suited to the rough trails and rugged terrain of the West and was used widely during the second half of the nineteenth century. Though this type of coach was used all across the country and in other countries as well, it has become most closely associated to Americans’ minds with Western travel.

Stagecoaches had been running through some areas of the West for thirty years by the time the Cheyenne to Black Hills stage route was established in 1876. Gold had been discovered in thte Black Hills and people were flocking there in huge numbers – despite the fact that this was illegal because the Black Hills still belonged to the Sioux nation.

The gold seekers would not be denied and entered the Black Hills by the thousands. More people followed all clamoring for quick transportation and mail service, and the stagecoach line was a means to provide it.

Even though non-native settlement was not legal until 1877, Deadwood had several thousand inhabitants and 200 or more buildings including theaters, saloons, and stores of all kinds by the end of 1876. For the next 11 years, Deadwood grew and changed, all the while being served by the stagecoach as one of the fastest transportation means of connection with the rest of the country.