Custer Expedition

The expedition this bronze commemorates was a moving town. On July 2, 1874, Custer led 995 soldiers and civilians out of Fort Abraham Lincoln with 110 wagons drawn by 660 mules, three Gatling guns and a Rodman cannon, a sixteen-piece band, five newspapermen and two miners. Sixty or seventy Arikara and Santee scouts rode ahead under Bloody Knife, and Sarah Campbell, the expedition's Black cook, is remembered as the first non-Native woman to enter the Hills. William Illingworth, hired at thirty dollars a month, made about seventy photographs and died destitute in 1893.

What the plaque says

Commemorating the passage of the Custer Expedition to the Black Hills - 1874 - Dedicated by the Historical Landmark Commission of Wyoming July, 1940

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vore Buffalo Jump — 12 mi
  A gypsum sinkhole where hunters trapped bison for 250 years, each hunt sealed in its own layer, and the reason Interstate 90 bends south here.
• Aladdin Coal Tipple — 18 mi
  The last nineteenth-century wooden coal tipple believed to stand in the country, which fed Black Hills gold smelters and is now close to falling.
• Devils Tower National Monument — 22 mi
  A plug of gray-green igneous rock cooled into columns 40 million years ago, first climbed on a stake ladder in 1893, where a parachutist was stranded for six days in 1941.

More markers nearby

• Crook County — steps away
• Inyan Kara Methodist Episcopal Church — 9.9 mi
• Devils Tower — 20 mi
• Canyon Springs Station: Site of the "Treasure Run" Stage Robbery — 25 mi