The Thoen Stone

In 1887 Louis Thoen was quarrying on Lookout Mountain above Spearfish when he turned up a slab of sandstone scratched with a message: seven men, led by Ezra Kind, had found gold in the Black Hills in 1834, forty years before Custer’s expedition made it public, and were being killed one by one by Indians. “I have lost my gun and nothing to eat and Indians hunting me.” Authenticity has been argued ever since; the names on it match real people of the period, and no convincing forger has been identified. It is on display at the Adams Museum in Deadwood.