The Frontier Characters of South Dakota

Calamity Jane, Wild Bill and George Custer roamed the Black Hills.

- CANDY MOULTON

On July 2, 1874, George Armstrong Custer led a surveying expedition of around 1,000 men, 110 wagons and hundreds of head of mules, horses and cattle from Fort Abraham Lincoln into the Black Hills of western South Dakota. He had orders to explore and locate a potential site for a fort in the Black Hills and to establish a route to Fort Laramie.

Unofficially, Custer’s expedition was tasked with determining whether there was truth to the rumors of gold in the Black Hills. This was the first military encroachment into the Black Hills, the long-held territory of the Lakota people. Traveling with Custer were both White and Indian scouts, teamsters, scientists, five newspaper reporters, two miners, photographer William Illingworth, and even a 16-piece band.

By late July Custer’s command had established a camp south of what would later be called Harney Peak and is now named Black Elk Peak, near the present town of Custer. Some of the men climbed the peak; they mapped the area and then traveled west into present Wyoming where Custer climbed Inyan Kara Mountain, south of Sundance, and carved his name on the rocks giving the area below the name “floral valley.”

In their explorations, the Custer expedition produced a number of photographs, a slew of newspaper accounts and noted the presence of gold in the area. The word spread quickly, and in 1875 a scientific expedition to the Black Hills led by Henry Newton and Walter Jenney with troops commanded by Gen. George Crook, confirmed the gold. Maps drawn by Valentine T. McGillycuddy, a cartographer with the expedition, provided detailed information for those who instigated the Black Hills Gold Rush.

By June 1876, when Custer met his demise in the Battle on the Greasy Grass, or Little Bighorn, the rough and tumble town of Deadwood was established, one of many gold towns that sprang up in the Black Hills.