Custer and the Gold That Started Everything
Near Custer, South Dakota
The town of Custer sits at the center of one of the more consequential moments in Black Hills history. In the summer of eighteen seventy-four, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led a one-thousand-man expedition into the Black Hills, which at the time were legally off-limits to settlers under the Fort Laramie Treaty. The official mission was to find a site for a military post.
The unofficial mission was to settle the question of gold. On French Creek, just east of where the town now stands, civilian prospector Horatio Ross found placer gold in the stream gravel. Custer sent a courier to report the discovery, and within months the news was in every newspaper in the country.
Tens of thousands of miners poured into the hills in violation of federal law, and the federal government ultimately responded by forcing the Lakota to surrender the land. The rush that started here on French Creek remade the entire region.
