County of marker: Harding County
Location of marker: Canam Hwy (US-85/SD-20), Centennial Park, Buffalo
Marker erected: July 3, 2009
Marker erected by: Harding County Chamber of Commerce
Marker text:
Ludlow Cave and the small town of Ludlow, SD, both got their name from Maj. William Ludlow, the engineering officer who accompanied Lt. Col. George A. Custer on his expedition through the Black Hills and what is now western South Dakota. ON July 11, some of the men in the expedition visited the largest of the many caves in the North Cave Hills, a sandstone cavern that had long been a sacred site for Plains and Rocky Mountain Indians, including the Hidatsa, Crow, Arikara Cheyenne, Assiniboine and Sioux. Guided by an Arikara brave names Goose, the soldiers found the cavern in a sandstone cliff, some 20 feet high at the entrance and about 300 feet deep.
Ludlow Cave is located four miles southwest of Ludlow, SD, just inside the Custer National Forest boundary.
When Custer's guide, Goose, took the explorers to the cave in 1874, they found walls covered with images that had held sacred meanings for many generations of Native peoples. Goose had described the cave as full of bones, its walls covered with magical images.
The soldiers found rude scrawlings on the walls and heaps of arrows, moccasins and tools littering the floor of the cave entrance. The soldiers looted the sacred offerings and scrawled their initials over ancient art.
George F. Will of Bismarck, ND, with a small group of men, explored the Ludlow Cave and surrounding area in September 1908. On the walls of the cave were found pictographs of Indian carvings. At one time the entrance walls were covered with these, according to men who had visited the spot 30 years earlier. Huge blocks of sandstone had broken off and fallen from the walls, but many of the fallen slabs showed traces of the pictographs. The large variety of subjects in the pictographs showed animals such as deer, dogs and horses. Also symbols of various sorts, including totemic signs, which perhaps were pictures of various conceptions of "waken" (Indian Medicine Men). The pictographs were not found beyond 50 feet back in the cave, where the line of penetration of sunlight stops.
What was surprising was a number of human faces in very strong bas-relief. If they could have been removed properly they were nearly perfectly carved heads. Only two deeply carved pictures were removed and then were sent to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. A photograph was taken before removal and secured.
An artificial pile (8' x 12') of small rocks was found 100' to the left of the entrance suggesting some sort of a burial.
Also found about a mile from the cave was apparently a 30' effigy construction made with boulders on the flat top of a low mound outlining an oval circle, with 3 lines of boulders, approximately 35 degrees apart, extending from each end of the oval. It was the only effigy of this sort seen on the 600 mile trip through western North and South Dakota.
In July 1920, self-taught archeologist W.H. Over excavated some 3 feet of soil and debris to the bedrock floor of the cave. The soil was screened and hundreds of artifacts were removed -- tools, bones, stone points, Catlinite pipe fragments, arrow points, shell pendants, beads made of shells from the Pacific by an unidentified tribe, etc. Most of the cache was taken to what is now the W.H. Over Museum at he University of South Dakota at Vermilion. At the same time, a gold ring was found and also the scalps of two white women, who have never been identified.
Sadly, generations of visitors have followed the example of Custer's men; the walls of both the Ludlow Cave and the surrounding bluff are deeply scarred with scores of names, dates, initials and inscriptions, most cut thoughtlessly, without intent to defile the ancient art in these 22,000 lonely acres of the Cave Hills.