See the Hills from Custer
This year, Custer will celebrate its 85th Gold Discovery Days, held annually to commemorate the discovery of gold in the Custer area.
The celebration begins July 25 and continues through July 27.
According to Tammy Wicks, 2006 president of the Gold Discovery Days Committee, Horatio Ross discovered gold along French Creek in 1874. Ross was a member of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s gold-seeking regiment.
The discovery led to the gold rush in the Black Hills.
Annual events during Gold Discovery Days include an arts & craft festival, children's events, parade, car show, fun run, volleyball tournament and hot-air balloon rally.
Custer is also the hub of a number of other popular summer activities.
The fourth annual Custer Stampede is an ongoing outdoor artistic display that begins May 25 and culminates with food, festivities and an auction of the artwork on Sept. 29. The stampede features life-size buffalo forms that are decorated by area artists, along with a variety of buffalo art, all on public display throughout Custer.
June 21-22 brings the Old West Fest to the Custer area, featuring historic re-enactors, food, entertainment and shoot-outs. The event is held at the Four Mile Old West Town four miles west of Custer on Highway 16.
The Fourth of July weekend brings old-fashioned fun to Custer visitors with the annual Old Time Country Fair, sponsored by Custer’s 1881 Courthouse Museum. For fireworks, Pageant Hill is the place to be at dusk on July 4 through 6 with some of the area’s best pyrotechnic displays.
Rounding out reasons to make Custer your hub for summer fun are the many events scheduled in nearby Custer State Park and at Crazy Horse Memorial. In addition, some of the most beautiful sections of the Mickelson Trail wind through the Hills surrounding Custer.
Custer
Although it doesn’t seem so when traveling, the altitude at Custer (population 1,850; elevation 5,318 feet) is higher than nearby Mount Rushmore at its base. It appears instead to be in a lower valley when approached from U.S. highways 16 and 385 from the north — often paralleling the trail blazed by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer on his 1874 Black Hills Expedition. It was on this trip to map the region that gold was discovered along French Creek, which began the Black Hills Gold Rush.
Within weeks of Custer’s return, wagon trains were on the move to the gold diggings, which had been declared off-limits to settlers in 1868. The army removed the illegal immigrants the next spring, but it was futile. The nation’s financial woes and bad crops of 1873 brought desperate men to the Black Hills in droves.
Custer mining was on again, off again over the years. Mica, copper, tin, iron, platinum and later, uranium, were among the varieties of ores produced in the Custer district.
Custer’s stalwart courthouse (now a museum) dates to 1881. The 1927 Custer Community Center, currently the Custer YMCA, is considered one of the largest early log buildings in the U.S.
Gold Discovery Days in Custer was started in 1924 with portrayals of the Black Hills’ beauty and legends. American Indians, soldiers and cowboys all participate in one of the Hills’ most popular continuing tourism events.
Custer State Park, at 73,000 acres, ranks as one of America’s premier state parks. Crazy Horse Memorial, the world’s largest sculpture-in-progress, begun in 1948 by Korczak Ziolkowski, is nearby and is recognized as one of the wonders of the modern world.