John "Potato Creek Johnny" Perrett
1866 (or 1868)-1943. Prospector and local celebrity
John Perrett was born on February 9 in Abergavenny, Wales. Sources disagree on the year, 1866 or 1868, and South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s account implies the earlier date by having him emigrate at seventeen in 1883. He stood about 4 feet 3 inches tall. He made his way to the Black Hills, staked a claim on Potato Creek, and gained the name that outlived his own.
The nugget
On May 27, 1929, while panning on his claim, he found one of the most famous pieces of gold in the Hills. Sources give the weight as 7.346 or about 7.43 troy ounces. The Adams Museum’s listing uses 7.346, which seems the safest figure. He sold it in 1934 to W.E. Adams for $250, for display in the museum Adams had founded four years earlier.
Doubt
Not everyone believed the story. Some locals suspected the nugget was melted-down gold rather than a natural find. The experts who later examined it considered it likely genuine because it holds natural quartz crystals. That is the most balanced conclusion available.
Celebrity
Perrett became a local celebrity, known for his small stature. The accounts of his life come largely from people who enjoyed him, and they leave out much. They do not, for example, record what he earned from prospecting over his decades in the Hills, or how he lived between the nugget and his death. Much of what is repeated about his fame is anecdote rather than record, and readers should treat it that way.
Mount Moriah
He died in Deadwood on February 26, 1943, at about 77. He was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery next to Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. It is a neat piece of local myth-making in itself: the tiny gold panner who actually found something lies alongside the gunfighter and the frontier celebrity. The cemetery closed to new burials in 1949, six years later.