Horatio Ross laid claim to several sites near Custer and remained in the town for 30 years. Army quickly responded by chasing the gold-seekers out of the Black Hills, but by the summer of 1875, Horatio Ross and hundreds of others flocked westward to search for gold.įor months miners and prospectors searched the creeks in the Custer area until richer and more promising gold strikes occurred near Deadwood in the northern “Hills”. Once General Custer and the Expedition left the Black Hills in August of 1874, newspaper articles appeared nationwide and gold prospectors began pouring into the ‘forbidden’ territory. While the “Permanent Camp”, located just east of the present-day City of Custer, Ross staked out a claim along with a dozen others who saw the potential for rich deposits in French Creek. The Black Hills was part of the Native American Reservation which encompassed the western half of the state of South Dakota. The Horatio Ross discovery of gold in the Black Hills, presented a problem because this was disputed territory. James Marshall was a New Jersey native who failed at farming and while working for John Sutter building a water-powered mill on the American River in California, discovered one of the richest gold fields in world history. Horatio Ross accompanied General George Custer on the 1874 Black Hills Expedition and discovered gold on French Creek near what is now Custer, SD.

The coincidence is that neither man became rich by being the first to discover the precious metal. An odd coincidence links the man who discovered gold in the Black Hills in 1874 and the man who discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in California 25 years earlier.

Black hills gold findings