Custer State Park and the Buffalo Roundup
South of Rapid City, in the granite and grassland of the southern Black Hills, lies one of the largest and oldest state parks in the country. Custer State Park spreads across many tens of thousands of acres of forest, meadow, and rock, and it is best known for the great herd of bison that ranges over its open country. Each autumn that herd is gathered in a spectacle that draws crowds from across the region and beyond, a thundering roundup that has become one of the signature events of the Black Hills calendar.
The park took shape in the years around the First World War, championed by Peter Norbeck, the South Dakota governor whose hand lies on so much of the Black Hills public landscape. The reserve was originally established as a state game preserve and grew, under Norbeck’s persistent attention, into a full state park of considerable size. He cared about its boundaries, its roads, and its wildlife, and he resisted efforts to whittle it down, holding to the idea that South Dakota should keep a large piece of its mountain country in public hands.
The return of the bison
The bison herd is the heart of the park’s identity, and its history mirrors the larger story of the animal on the plains. The great herds that once numbered in the millions had been all but exterminated by the late nineteenth century, reduced to scattered remnants. In the early twentieth century, conservation-minded efforts across the country worked to rebuild herds from those survivors, and the new park acquired bison to stock its grasslands. From a modest beginning the herd grew over the decades into one of the largest publicly owned bison herds anywhere, numbering well over a thousand animals in most years.
A herd that size, ranging free over open country, requires management, and that necessity gave rise to the park’s most famous event. Each fall the bison are gathered and driven in the Buffalo Roundup, when mounted riders and vehicles move the herd across the grasslands to corrals where the animals are counted, checked, vaccinated, and sorted, with a portion sold at auction to keep the herd in balance with the land that feeds it. The roundup is a working operation with a practical purpose, but it has also become a public draw, watched by tens of thousands of spectators who gather on the hillsides to see the herd come thundering across the prairie in a cloud of dust.
A landscape of more than bison
The park is far more than its bison. Pronghorn, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep range its country, and a famous band of begging burros, descended from animals once used to carry visitors, wanders the roads looking for handouts. The scenic highways that Norbeck championed run through and around the park, among them the granite-threading Needles Highway and the looping Iron Mountain Road. High in the park’s western reaches lies Sylvan Lake, the mountain lake set among granite walls that Norbeck particularly treasured. Lodges built in the park’s early years, including the one where President Coolidge spent the summer of 1927, still take in guests.
The park sits within country the Lakota hold sacred, part of the Black Hills that were taken from them in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, and a full account of the place does not set that history aside. The bison whose return the park celebrates were central to Lakota life, and their near-destruction was bound up with the conquest of the plains. The herd that ranges the park today carries that weight along with its conservation success.
For Rapid City, the park is one of the great anchors of the regional tourism economy, a destination that gives visitors a reason to come to the Hills and to base themselves in the gateway city to the north. The annual roundup in particular has grown into an event that fills hotels and brings people from across the country to watch a piece of the old plains brought briefly back to life. The herd thunders across the grass, the dust rises, and for a moment the country looks something like it once did, before the railroads and the rifles changed it forever.