Custer, South Dakota

My wife came down with a cold on Wednesday, so I volunteered to let her sleep late on Thursday while I drove into Custer and bought pastries for breakfast. I used the opportunity to tour the town. Many businesses and most street corners had painted buffalo statues, some of which were impressive and some of which were just gaudy. I took a Red Chair photo with the one that stuck out the most. I made no effort to photograph them all, nor have I included all the photographs I took.

I liked the town. It had two great restaurants, the residents were friendly, and it wasn’t pimped up like Deadwood and Keystone. It was on this morning that we began having trouble with a couple of our tires. Every morning, a dashboard light would indicate that we were losing pressure. We’d fill them up, and they’d be fine for the day, but the next morning the light would be on again. I thought perhaps it had something to do with the altitude, but as the week went on and the problem didn’t go away, we decided to have it looked at. I talked with the waitress at Baker’s Bakery on Sunday morning and she told us to take the car to Leo, the local tire guy. I asked if he would be open on a Sunday, and she said, “If he’s not, just knock on the door.” (We didn’t do that, and we made it all the way home. Our local tire guy found nails in two tires, which I find strange. I wonder if some kid at Mount Rushmore put nails behind our tires as a joke.)

Incidentally, the street visible in the background of several of the buffalo statue photos is purported to be the widest Main Street in the United States — wide enough for oxen pulling a wagon to make a U-turn.

There is more to Custer than gaudy buffalo statues. There’s also this odd bust of Lieutenant Colonel Custer himself, in celebration of the 1874 Army expedition he led into the Black Hills to look for a location for a fort and search for gold. His unit, the 7th Cavalry, camped on the site of Custer. They found gold, which caused a huge gold rush into the region which had been promised to the Sioux Indians. Partly in response to this invasion, the Sioux went to war with the U.S. One of the battles of this war took place on the Little Big Horn River, where Custer and his troop were wiped out.

If that odd, pink monument isn’t weird enough, there’s also a much larger monument to Horace N. Ross, the member of Custer’s expedition who discovered the gold which led to all the kerfuffle.

On the way back to the lodge, I made a quick side trip down to the shore of Sylvan Lake. I passed through a state park check station and was vehemently flagged down by a woman in a ranger uniform. She came storming over to the car and saw my state park pass on the dashboard by the steering wheel where I had put it to avoid gumming up the glass. She leaned in the passenger window and said, “I need to see that.” She ripped it from my hand, tore the backing off and pasted it to the windshield on her side of the car. She looked at me and said sternly, “It needs to be here so we can see it.” I said nothing and drove meekly on. Three minutes later I passed her going the opposite direction. She waved and smiled like we’d been friends for years.

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