* Custer Lives

I'm back from a week w/ my daughter Emma; I picked her up in Denver and took her to visit her grandma, uncle, & cousins in "the Black mining Hills of Dakota." I grew up in the Black Hills, and it struck me on this visit how we longtime locals take the place names for granted, seldom or never considering their origins.

Take the town—and the state park—called Custer, for instance. We camped out at Custer State Park last Friday night—oh, the Mountain Bluebirds & Western Tanagers—and attended a "camp-ranger" presentation that evening, on the park's "Wildlife Management," that is, the state's control of the big-game populations, mostly. When the college student/intern finished her talk, Tom the Terrible raised his—er, my—hand: "I was just curious about the origin of the Park's name. Why Custer? I do recall that he ordered over 700 Indian ponies to be put to death on the spot at one point in his storied career. Is this an example of good 'wildlife management,' perhaps inspiring the name choice?" (Thankfully, most people there got the sarcasm.) She hemmed and hawed, and did her best at disavowing such past behavior, until I actually felt sorry for her. But then, Custer's bloodlust continued into the 20th century in western SoDak, so much so that most of the Park's vaunted large mammals are (re-)imports, including the bison. And at least one, the (Rocky Mountain) Bighorn Sheep, is a "surrogate" for a similar Black-Hills-native animal that was hunted to extinction (Audubon's Bighorn Sheep, all individuals gone to animal heaven by 1916).