The Town That Emptied

Custer is the oldest town in the Black Hills and it very nearly did not survive its second year. The site was organised in July 1875 under the name Stonewall, renamed Custer City that August, and built in earnest from January 1876, on the ground where gold had been found. By March 1876 its population was being estimated at somewhere between six and ten thousand, a range wide enough to show that nobody actually counted. Then the gulch at Deadwood opened and the town went north almost at once. A Black Hills promotional volume printed in 1904 says that Custer was practically abandoned, with fourteen souls left to hold the fort among fourteen hundred buildings, an even hundred apiece, and adds that the fourteen threw up breastworks and waited three weeks before anyone else arrived. That figure has been repeated ever since. It first appears five years earlier, in Annie Tallent's 1899 history of the hills, where she reports it as hearsay, and none of the furniture around it, the fourteen hundred buildings, the arithmetic, the breastworks, turns up anywhere before the 1904 volume. The county's own history today says only that the town was almost depopulated within a week. Custer had five or six hundred people by 1877 and about a thousand by 1904, and never came near its boom again. No mining district in the county has since been credited with as much as ten thousand ounces of gold.