Custer State Park: Peter Norbeck's Vision
Near Custer, South Dakota
The man most responsible for shaping the southern Black Hills into what they are today was a South Dakota governor named Peter Norbeck. Norbeck had grown up farming the prairies to the east and fell in love with the Black Hills as a young man. When he became governor in nineteen seventeen, he set about preserving them.
He championed what had been a modest game preserve and pushed it through the legislature as a full state park. On July first, nineteen nineteen, Custer State Park officially opened as South Dakota's first and largest state park, covering what would grow to about seventy-one thousand acres of granite peaks, rolling meadows, pine forest, and the wide prairie valleys known locally as the Flats. Norbeck's idea of a road was not an engineer's idea.
He did not want straight lines or gentle grades. He wanted roads that stopped drivers in their tracks, that forced them around boulders and through rock formations and up to viewpoints that would leave them speechless. He personally hiked much of the terrain before any construction began, driving stakes and marking the route he imagined.
The result was a system of scenic drives that remains among the finest in the American West. Peter Norbeck became a United States senator from South Dakota and died in office in nineteen thirty-six, but his real monument is the park below these mountains, exactly as strange and beautiful as he intended.
