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Smoldering Duff. As evacuees finally bedded down in nearby towns of Sturgis and Spearfish (S.D.) and Newcastle (Wyo.) and in hundreds of tourist cabins in the Black Hills, the fighters worked through the night. Twenty miles away, outside the town of Nemo, another fire raged. Said one fire boss grimly: "If them two sons of bitches come together and start crowning [i.e., spreading among the treetops], it won't stop till it gets to Custer, and we'll all look like Custer's men after the battle." At midmorning next day, the men were still fighting. Two Forest Service planes—a converted 6-24 and a Navy torpedo bomber—began bombing hot spots with 500-gal. loads of a slurry made of bentonite and water. Slowly the fire fighters won control, and by midafternoon Deadwood's residents were told to come back home.
At last all danger was past, though the fire itself smoldered softly through the duff on the forest floor. Remarkably, nobody was killed (a few fire fighters were injured), and the only severe damage for Deadwood came with the destruction of the two lumber plants, a lot of dry lawns, a trailer park, a few houses on the town's edge, and Deadwood Dick's famous cabin in the woods. It was a nightmarish ordeal all around, but in the telling of tales that makes old Deadwood a paradise for tourists, it was bound to get much worse until, ultimately, it might even rival the tales of Deadwood Dick himself, and of Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, Poker Alice, and that mean coward Jack McCall.