Captain Nathaniel Pope Biography


	This biography appears on pages 1407-1408 in "History of South 
	Dakota" by Doane Robinson, Vol. II (1904) and was scanned, 
	OCRed and edited by Maurice Krueger, mkrueger@iw.net.

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	CAPTAIN NATHANIEL POPE, of Keystone, Pennington county, was born 
on March 27, 1830, at St. Louis, Missouri, and is the son of William and 
Eliza (Douglas) Pope, the former a native of Kentucky and the latter of 
Missouri. His forefathers came to America in colonial days and several 
members of the family were soldiers in the Revolutionary war. His 
maternal grandparents were among the first settlers in Missouri and 
aided in bringing that great state into being. He grew to the age of 
twenty in his native city and received his education in its public 
schools. In 1859 the family moved to Springfield, Illinois, where they 
were living at the beginning of the Civil war. Volunteering in defense 
of the Union in that memorable contest, he received a staff appointment 
as captain, and when his uncle, Gen. John Pope, applied to President 
Lincoln, who was a friend of the family, to have his nephew assigned to 
duty on his staff while he was in command of the Army of Virginia, the 
request was ,granted and the captain served on his uncle's staff during 
the whole time of his command of that part of the Federal forces. In the 
spring of 1864 General Sully applied to have the captain go with him on 
an expedition up the Missouri to quiet the Indians, and he was attached 
to this expedition and its works are masters' of history. It fitted out 
at Sioux City with three thousand men and proceeded up the river to the 
site of old Fort Rice, which General Sully then built. Captain Pope was 
in command of the Prairie Battery, and on the trip he met Father De Smet 
who gave him his first information of the prevalence of gold in the 
Black Hills. They had a number of engagements with the Indians, one of 
which, in the Bad Lands at the headwaters of the Little Missouri, was 
disastrous to the savages, but the whites escaped with small losses. 
Captain Pope was mustered out of service at Fort Leavenworth in 
February, 1866, and in the spring of that year he went to Montana. 
Locating at Fort Benton, he followed merchandising for a year and was 
then appointed agent for the Indians on the upper Missouri. After four 
years' service in that capacity, he was appointed by President Grant, in 
the fall of 1870, superintendent of Indian affairs in New Mexico. He 
held this position three years, after which he remained in the territory 
two more, engaged mostly in mining. In 1875 he went to California, where 
he passed four years mining, then went to Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone 
in Montana. There he was manager of a large post trader and general 
store until the fall of 1880, when he came to Deadwood in this state. A 
year later he moved to Harney, a mile and a half from Keystone, where he 
conducted a store two years and afterward engaged in prospecting and 
mining. Since 1884 he has lived at what is now Keystone, which he helped 
to found, there being no town at the point when he settled there, and 
has been continuously connected with the mining industry in this 
section. For three years he was bookkeeper for the old Keystone Mining 
Company, and in 1902 accepted a position in the office of the Holy 
Terror Mining Company, which he still holds. He has a number of mining 
claims of his own which are full of promise. Fraternally, he belongs to 
the Grand Army of the Republic.