Word: gulch
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...heyday, the gold-mining town of Deadwood, S.D., nestling in a steep-sided gulch in the Black Hills, was a brawling, ripsnorting oasis of 25,000 people, pungent with gunsmoke and ribaldry. There, in the late 1800s, Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane lived-until that mean coward Jack McCall plugged Hickok in the back of the head as he sat at a poker table in Saloon Number Ten. There Poker Alice, the gnarled old cigar-smoking card shark, fleeced many a dude; and there lived Deadwood Dick Clark, the legendary stagecoach driver who somehow always saved the gold from...
There was another villain in the Deadwood legend: fire. Any flicker of flame in the bottom of the valley would feed upward to the houses above. And every Deadwood youngster knew that the gulch was a natural chimney when forest fires swept through the adjacent piny hills. A fire starting in a bakery charred Deadwood in 1879. The town was rebuilt with a water barrel on every roof, survived three big fires in 1951-52. Last week, for 24 hours, Deadwood (pop. 4,000) broiled under the windswept fingers of a forest fire that threatened to cook it once...
...movements, have been almost as numerous as prospectors in the Klondike. But perhaps no one has told the story with the same fullness and readable authority as Canadian Journalist Pierre Berton in The Klondike Fever. Author Berton's credentials are convincing. His father staked a claim on Quigley Gulch in 1898, and while it produced only gravel, he stayed on and lived in fabled Dawson City for 40 years. Author Berton himself lived there until he was twelve, admits that it still "haunts my dreams and my memories...
...Thyroids. Inspectors armed with Geiger counters and chemical test apparatus swarmed over the dairy farms, testing grass, cows, milk and eggs. At first everything looked all right, but after a few days, inspectors reported samples of fresh milk spiked with radioactive iodine 131. The cows of Geiger Gulch were eating contaminated grass, and the concentration of iodine 131 in their milk and thyroid glands was building up. No sample was found to be really dangerous, but as a precaution, all milk from 150 farms was ordered dumped. Later the embargo was extended to 1,000 more farms...
Mothers near Geiger Gulch switched their children to orange juice, and scrubbed them all over twice a day. Coal miners' unions worried about the air blown down their mine shafts. The big city of Manchester (pop. some 700,000) worried about its water, which comes from the edge of Geiger Gulch. Beef cattle sent to market from the region were marked with yellow paint so their thyroids would be destroyed right after slaughter. No one has been damaged yet (except the plant worker who was shaved), but all Britain has had a disquieting look at a kind of accident...