Where East met (Wild) West: excavations in a legendary gold rush town uncover the unsung labors of Chinese immigrants on the frontier.(Digs)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-MAR-05

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In a small lab on the outskirts of Rapid City, South Dakota, Donn Ivey, an itinerant researcher whose business card reads "Have Trowel, Will Travel," swiveled in his chair and peered into a small pile of dirt. With his left hand, he adjusted his trucker's cap. With his right, he nudged a pair of stainless-steel forceps into the dark earth. "I found a pair of tweezers, right there," he said, pulling out a rusted, V-shaped strip of metal and carefully putting it aside.

Last summer, Ivey drove his RV to this lab, run by the state's Archaeological Research Center, to participate in the excavation of a 19th-century Chinese neighborhood buried under the fabled Wild West boomtown of Deadwood (once home to Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane). State archaeologists have been working at the Deadwood site, in the Black Hills 50 miles northeast of Rapid City, for three years. In August they closed down the dig and shipped the final box-loads of bone, wood, metal and glass to the state's lab for analysis.

The excavation is South Dakota's largest: a half-million-dollar project that began in May 2001, after a...

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