What the future holds for the Black Hills

By TERRY WOSTER
Argus Leader  (6/28/01)

CUSTER -- As surely as George Armstrong Custer and Crazy Horse are forever linked by Little Bighorn, so will the Black Hills town named after the soldier and the nearby mountain carving dedicated to the Lakota warrior be intertwined in history yet to be written.

"When people think of Custer, they also think of Little Bighorn and Crazy Horse," says Jessie Sundstrom, longtime newspaper publisher who currently manages the Custer County 1881 Courthouse Museum. "That's just the way it is. And, you have to admit it, people here play on the connection and the history. It's what they have."

Indeed, it is. And it seems to be working, both for the community founded on the site where two miners traveling with the Custer expedition found gold in the gravel bottom of French Creek in 1874 and for the massive mountain carving five miles north of town, a work in progress to the Oglala warrior who teamed with Sitting Bull to defeat Lt. Col. Custer and his 7th Cavalry 125 years ago this week.

If the casual visitor sees irony in the proximity of the two famed combatants of the Plains, that's to be expected.

Korczak Ziolkowski, the New England-born sculptor who worked for a time on the nearby Mount Rushmore carvings before leaving after a run-in with a family member of project chief Gutzon Borglum, might have been able to find other mountains that would have suited his carving. That's the opinion, at least, of Deadwood historian Bob Lee, a member of the Crazy Horse Foundation board. The current site is a wonderful mountain for the carving, Lee says, but its location may have been part of its charm.

"After Korczak left Rushmore, I think he might have looked over at Custer and said, 'All right, I'll come down here and build an even bigger monument,' " says Lee, who first met the sculptor when he still lived in a tent in the shadow of the mountain and used a hand ax to cut trees to build a cabin on his property. "He had a stubborn streak to him."

Ruth Ziolkowski, who took over as manager of the mountain carving when her husband died in 1982, acknowledges that the Custer-Crazy Horse link wouldn't have gone unnoticed by Korczak.

"He always had a certain sense of humor," she said during a May interview as she talked about the beginning of detail work on the horse's head of the carving and the impact the finished head of Crazy Horse has had on both travelers and locals. "The proximity of these two things wouldn't have escaped him."

The community and the sculptor sometimes had as contentious, if not as violent, a relationship as their namesakes. In the early days, there were those in Custer who openly doubted the work would ever be finished, who questioned whether the sculptor ever intended to finish. And, Sundstrom admits, "Korczak could be his own worst enemy at times."

But those days are long gone and not worth rehashing, she says.

"I would never say a bad word about that project," she says.

Change in plans

Ruth Ziolkowski made a decision after her husband's death to change his plan of attack on the mountain. Korczak always intended to carve the horse first, then the rider. His widow decided to finish Crazy Horse first, a task completed two years ago. Having a completed, 90-foot-high face of a Lakota warrior looming on a nearby mountainside renewed interest in the project and propelled the local community to accept the work, she says.

"It's been important both to visitors and to the people of Custer," Ruth Ziolkowski says. "They see now clearly what he saw so long ago."

They also see, as do the regional and state tourism promoters, that Crazy Horse can be as much a magnet for travelers as Mount Rushmore itself, and in a region that counts on sightseers and vacationers to sustain its economy, that's vital.

"The town depends on tourism," Sundstrom says. "That can be an uncertain business, but it's what's there."

Timber and minerals

In the early days, logging was a mainstay of Custer, as it was for the rest of the Black Hills. So was mining, although not the gold mining the first prospectors thought would mean riches beyond belief. Within a couple of years of the French Creek find -- about the time Custer was meeting Crazy Horse at Little Bighorn, in fact -- gold strikes in the northern Black Hills, around Deadwood and near Lead, pulled the panners and prospectors out of the Custer valley. What had been dubbed the "Mother City of the Black Hills" just a short time earlier was in danger of disappearing.

"Custer became almost a ghost town overnight when the gold rush headed north," says Lee.

But gold isn't the only mineral in the ground in the Black Hills, and the Custer mining industry returned with the discovery of uses for feldspar, mica and limestone. And many of the mining companies set up their own sawmills, giving that industry a boost.

"We had as many as 30 sawmills operating in the Black Hills alone at one time," Sundstrom says. "Only a few are left. Well, they were denuding the hills, really, but the attitude at the time was that there was all this timber."

Before the turn of the century, the U.S. Forest Service had begun to oversee the use of the public forests. The agency has its Black HIlls headquarters located at the north edge of Custer.

"There are more trees in the Black Hills today than there were when Custer's party traveled through," Lee says.

That's true, says freelance photographer Paul Horsted, who grew up in the Brandon area but now lives near Custer.

"But the timber is smaller. The trees aren't as tall, and they aren't as thick," he says.

Horsted is gaining a unique insight into the Custer expedition and the changes since. He's been commissioned by the Forest Service to recreate the photographs taken by William Illingworth, who traveled with Custer on the 1874 visit. Forty-five of the photos Illingworth made during that trip are in the Black Hills. Horsted has found all but a handful, and he isn't finished.

"To the Forest Service, this is a unique way to study changes in the forest in the last 127 years," Horsted says. "For me, it's been like stepping through history. There's a feeling I can hardly describe about standing in the same spot, framing the same scene that someone else did more than a century earlier. I've always had an interest in history of the area, but this has made it more intense."

He has found places where a rock outcropping, a particularly sturdy pine, even a burned stump from an Illingworth photo is still in place. He's also found, as he says, that while there seem to be more trees, they aren't as big.

"And there seems to be a lot more ground clutter, pine needles, branches, things like that," he says.

Town of tourists, retirees

Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore and other nearby attractions have made tourism one of Custer's major industries, and in the summer the streets are thick with motor homes, station wagons, minivans and motorcycles.

"A lot of people have tied their livelihood to those visitors, and the way the tourist season goes has a big part in how the community goes," Sundstrom says.

The future of Custer is going to involve people who don't just travel through. More and more, the area is becoming a retirement center. It shows in the census numbers.

Custer County tallied 7,275 people in the 2000 census. That's up from 6,179 in 1990 and 4,906 in 1960. But the median age, the age at which half the residents are younger and half are older, has increased from 31.1 years in 1960 to 36.7 years in 1990. Between 1960 and 1998, the number of residents younger than 18 remained almost constant. The number 65 and older nearly doubled.

Some of the new residents are from other states, one-time travelers who passed through, remembered and decided to settle in the southern hills of South Dakota after retirement.

Other retirees are South Dakota natives who grew up knowing about the Black Hills, who went away to earn a living and who are attracted home as retirement approaches.

Owen and Lois Murphy are examples of the new retirees. Raised in the central part of South Dakota, they lived in the Minneapolis area for years. Owen worked as a computer systems specialist, traveling the country on business jobs. Two years ago, with their children grown, they began watching the real estate ads for Black Hills land, saw a small acreage south of Custer near Pringle and moved home, or nearly home.

"We hope to be able to retire here someday, although we're looking at a working retirement," Murphy says. "If you grew up anywhere in South Dakota, your parents took you to the Black Hills sometime in your life. We've always had this place in the back of our minds, I guess."

Together, they built a house for themselves, then a sort of bunkhouse, cabins and a corral to hold nine saddle horses. It's becoming the Country Charm Cabins and Corrals, a place where large family groups can gather for a weekend reunion or where horse fanciers can take guided trail rides through the cool valleys and along the spruce-shaded slopes of the southern Black Hills.

"It's a gradual retirement," says Lois Murphy, who does much of the guiding on trail rides. "We can't afford to do nothing, and I don't think we're ready for that, anyway. But we were ready to get out of the city."

Owen Murphy is a bit of a modem cowboy, as he continues to commute to computer jobs, most often in New York City these days. That means a drive to Rapid City to catch a flight east, where he works for several days at a time on a project, then catches a late flight home to work on the ranch. Someday, he says, he'll be able to quit the commute and be a full-time dude ranch operator.

"We really like this area, and we're meeting a lot of the local people," he says. "We hope it's our future."

Reach Terry Woster at:  twoster@midco.net