Custer, South Dakota: At the Crossroads of the Black Hills
Near Custer, South Dakota
You are in Custer, a small mountain town sitting at the heart of the southern Black Hills of South Dakota, tucked into a valley at roughly five thousand three hundred feet above sea level. The town is named for the general whose cavalry expedition rode through these hills in the summer of eighteen seventy-four and came back with gold. That discovery changed everything, and the town that grew from it carries both the legacy and the complicated weight of what followed.
Custer was among the first permanent settlements in the Black Hills, founded by prospectors in eighteen seventy-five before the federal government had worked out what to do with the land they were standing on. The gold here played out quickly, sending most of the early rush northward to the richer strikes at Deadwood and Lead. Custer shrank, regrouped, and over the next century found a different kind of wealth entirely.
Today it is the base camp for an extraordinary concentration of natural and geological wonder. Within a twenty minute drive in any direction from this spot, you can find two national monuments and two national parks. Wind Cave, established in nineteen oh three as the sixth national park in the United States and the first cave park in the world, lies a few miles to the south.
Jewel Cave, now mapped as the fifth longest cave on earth, sits to the west. The Needles Highway threads north through a canyon of granite spires. And Custer State Park, one of the largest and finest state parks in the country, wraps around the town on three sides.
The park holds around thirteen hundred free-roaming bison, one of the largest publicly owned herds in North America, and every fall the spectacle of the bison roundup draws thousands of visitors to watch wranglers push the whole herd into corrals on a single sweeping drive. The Black Hills themselves are ancient beyond the usual meaning of the word. The granite at the core of these hills is among the oldest exposed rock on the continent, formed nearly two billion years ago and pushed upward over millennia into the rounded domes and spires you see today.
The Lakota people know the hills as Paha Sapa and have considered them sacred for generations. How Paha Sapa came to be ringed with tourist attractions and three presidential faces carved into granite is a story that Custer sits at the beginning of, and that this part of South Dakota is still living with.
