[2] According to the stone, Ezra Kind traveled to the Black Hills in 1833 in search of gold, at which time a treaty prevented the party from entering the area legally.

[1] On March 14, 1887,[5] Norwegian immigrants and brothers Louis and Ivan Thoen discovered the slab while collecting sandstone on the west face of Lookout Mountain near their home in Spearfish.

[4][5][6] The men took the slab home, and Louis invited Henry Keats (a later mayor of Spearfish) to see the stone and the location where it was found.

[7] Spearfish historian Frank Thomson formed the Thoen Stone Committee in 1950, which aimed to memorialize it at the site it was discovered.

The inscription reads:[7] Front: Came to these hills in 1833 seven of us De Lacompt Ezra Kind GW Wood T Brown R Kent Wm King Indian Crow all ded [sic] but me Ezra Kind Killed by Ind[ians] beyond the high hill got our gold June 1834 Back: got all of the gold we could carry our ponys [sic] all got by the Indians I hav [sic] lost my gun and nothing to eat and Indians hunting me Since its discovery in 1887, controversy over the authenticity of the Thoen Stone has circulated.

Thomson located several families, all with surnames similar to those listed on the Thoen Stone, who claimed to have had ancestors who disappeared in the American West around 1830.

Thompson also found evidence that Brown grew up in North Carolina during a local gold rush and may have gained knowledge of placer mining techniques during that time.

[7] Thomson also believed that the hunting knives carried by pioneers in the 1830s would have been sturdy enough to inscribe a message in a wet sandstone slab, and theorized that Kind would have had ample time while hiding to carve something.

Both determined that the inscriptions were not done by the same person, and the stone was not inscribed by either of the two Thoen brothers, Cashner, or John S. McClintock, who was an early advocate for the slab's authenticity.