CHAEACTEE OF THE DISTRICT. 277 



SECTION VI. 



SPEAB.FISH AND BEAE BUTTE CREEKS. 



These streams, emptying into the Red water and the Belle Fourche, 

 drain the extreme northern section of the main range of the Black Hills. 

 Rising near the limestone divide between Crook Tower and Custer Peak, 

 a spur of the great western mesa, they cut through a narrow belt of slate, 

 quartzite, and igneous rocks before entering the limestone formation en- 

 circling the Hills. This belt of slates, contracted between the two walls of 

 Carboniferous limestone, is an extension of the quartzite and clay-slate 

 formation covering so broad an expanse of territory on Spring and Rapid 

 Creeks. 



From the headwaters of Elk Creek it extends in a direction a little 

 north of west for twenty miles until terminated by the limestone ridge 

 between Spearfish and Floral Valley. Covering about one hundred and 

 fifty square miles, this area of metamorphic rocks has up to the present 

 time been only partly explored and prospected, owing to the exceedingly 

 rugged and impenetrable character of the region. It may aptly be called 

 a " pathless wilderness"; even game-trails are rarely seen, and the surface 

 of the country is so cut up by numerous narrow and abrupt canons as to 

 be impassable for wagons, and extremely difficult and fatiguing to traverse, 

 even with pack-mules. The bottoms of the canons and gorges are choked 

 with a tangled jungle of willow and grape-vines, and often beaver-dams 

 extend from cliff to cliff, producing boggy mud flats, whose depths we tried 

 to explore, but found no bottom in the fluid black ooze. Only in places 

 can the walls of the canons and ravines be scaled, while the ridges and 

 divides, steep, and broken into innumerable sharp, serrated peaks, are cov- 

 ered by timber, frequently blown down by the wind and subsequently 

 overgrown with thickets of aspen. The slow progress made through this 

 wilderness soon wears out both horse and rider, and the former, instead of 

 being an assistance, has to be led and pulled along most of the way. To 

 find yourself at a "jumping-off place," the end of some sharp ridge between 

 two streams, to descend hundreds of feet into the bottom of the canon, to 



