A very short, very heavy-set Sarah Campbell dressed in flashy calico with her trusty black and white dog at her side appeared to be well-known throughout the Black Hills. She cooked and cleaned for others, delivered babies, nursed the sick and loved a good laugh. But very few people knew that she also owned five silver mines.

Become a sleuth and solve the other mysteries of Sarah Campbell’s life for yourself!

Was she the woman in the shadowy background of a photograph taken by William H. Illingworth the night before gold was discovered in the Black Hills? Campbell, who cooked for the sutler on Custer’s 1874 Black Hills Expedition, told Chicago Inter-Ocean reporter William Curtis that she also had cooked on the first boat up the Missouri river. Could she really have cooked on the American Fur Company’s steamboat Yellow Stone when she was only eight years old?

The author suggests that Sarah Campbell was the child Sally who was enslaved by fur trader in St. Louis and sued for her freedom at the age of twelve. Sift though the evidence presented to see if you agree.

And, finally, the most interesting mystery of all. Why did Campbell always claim to be the first white woman to enter the Black Hills?