Homestake Gold Mine (Open Cut)

The Black Hills were guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty — then stolen for gold. The Homestake Mine, staked in 1876, became the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere, producing more than forty million troy ounces of gold before it closed in 2002. What remains above ground is the Open Cut: an enormous wound in the earth that doesn't apologize for what it is. Below it now, the Sanford Underground Research Facility pursues neutrinos and dark matter in the same depths that once chased ore.