The Homestake name and the original claim
Following Mose Manuel’s discovery of a quartz outcropping near the north fork of Gold Run Creek, the original Homestake Lode claim was filed the next day on April 9, 1876. The name “Homestake” came from the contemporary term “home stake”, which was popular among the miners of the American West at that time. It is said that if a prospector happened to find a rich and well-paying piece of ground – or his home stake – that he could work his fortune from it in a matter of time and ultimately return comfortably to his home in whatever part of the country he’d come from. One of the earliest references of the term that we could find dates back to October of 1866 when there was a small stampede for favorable gold diggings at what is aptly-named Homestake Gulch in Mineral County, Montana (near the Montana-Idaho border).
Back in 1876, the Homestake Lode would have been located in a draw and there would have been a small mountain where the Homestake Open Cut is situated today. The north fork of Gold Run Creek would have flowed down the side of the mountain as a tributary that eventually made its way to the creek of the same name. Downstream from what would become the Homestake Lode a few months later, a man named Thomas E. Carey is credited with being the first person to mine Gold Run Creek in February of ’76 and owning the first cabin in what would later become the city of Lead. Carey was a placer miner who was finding rich gold-bearing gravels, he evidently did not make an attempt to find the source of the gold further upstream.
What the Manuel brothers party did not know when they began working their newly-claimed Homestake Lode was that it sat right on top of two pre-existing claims that had been staked three months earlier in January of 1876 by John B. Pearson and party. Pearson and some of the men he prospected with are generally accepted as being one of the first prospectors to arrive in the northern Black Hills in the latter half of 1875 right before the Black Hills gold rush kicked-off. Up near the north fork of Gold Run Creek, Pearson and his party had located the Giant Lode (mineral survey no. 115) and the Gold Run Lode (mineral survey no. 116), they were the first two claims staked on that hill before the Homestake. Unlike the Manuel brothers, Harney, and Engh; Pearson’s party did not stick around through the rest of the winter and into the spring to work the Giant and the Gold Run claims, so even though the Homestake was staked over the top of those two, they weren’t being worked and really had no standing against the Homestake. Towards late 1877, George Hearst was well aware of the boundary dispute with the Homestake being partially located over the Giant and Gold Run claims and purchased the interests in the remaining Gold Run portion (outside of the Homestake) from E. Welch, William Gay, and James Levy for $1,000 each. Other, smaller portions of the Gold Run were acquired here-and-there until it was all owned by the Homestake investors. Around late spring of 1878, Hearst learned about the Giant Lode and that it was the oldest claim in that area. On June 29, he hired J.D. McIntyre to survey and plat the Homestake [above]. The Homestake Mining Company began stamping ore on July 12, 1878 and by the end of the year the battle over the Giant Lode would go in the Homestake investors’ favor. Come 1879, Hearst and partners would own many of the other claims in the vicinity of the Homestake Lode, including: the Golden Terra, the Old Abe, the Deadwood, and the Highland Chief.