Memorial to Horace N. Ross

This plaque gets its man's first name and his date wrong. He was Horatio N. Ross, the expedition's miner, as the 1971 campsite bronze east of town names him. On July 27, 1874, the column was still on Castle Creek; it reached French Creek on July 30, when Ross panned the first flecks, and the claims came on August 2. The monument was dedicated in 1921, and Custer's Gold Discovery Days began the next year. Ross stayed thirty years, showing visitors his find, and died poor in 1904.

What the plaque says

Dedicated to the memory of Horace N. Ross discoverer of gold in the Black Hills at Custer, So. Dak. July 27th, 1874

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Crazy Horse Memorial — 5.0 mi
  A Lakota elder's answer to Mount Rushmore, carved for more than seventy years by one family with private money, and still argued over by Crazy Horse's own relatives.
• Needles Highway — 6.9 mi
  Fourteen miles that Governor Peter Norbeck laid out on foot and horseback through the granite spires, threading a tunnel eight feet wide.
• Black Elk Peak — 7.8 mi
  The highest summit in the Black Hills, renamed in 2016 for an Oglala holy man after carrying, for 150 years, the name of the general who attacked a Sicangu camp in 1855.
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial — 11 mi
  Four faces blasted out of a sacred mountain by 400 workers in fourteen years, with a Jefferson that had to be dynamited off and a hall of records never finished.

More markers nearby

• Campsite of General Custer's Expedition — 3.2 mi
• In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent — 3.5 mi
• The Hearst Highway — 4.2 mi
• Mount Rushmore Inspiration — 6.2 mi