Archeological Site No. 39HN1

About this property

Ludlow Cave (SITS 39HN1) is an archaeological site in the North Cave Hills of rural Harding County, South Dakota, United States. It is regarded as a sacred site by several Native American tribes, who have long created rock art inside. The cave was visited by George Armstrong Custer as part of his 1874 Black Hills Expedition and was named for one of his officers, William Ludlow. Much of the original art has been destroyed by modern graffiti. Ludlow Cave is located about 4 miles (6.4 km) southwest of Ludlow in the northeastern quarter of section 12 of township 21, range 5 W, in rural Harding County, South Dakota, United States. The largest cave in the county, it is in the northern portion of the Cave Hills, a series of buttes bisected by Bull Creek into the North and South Cave Hills. It is located just inside the boundaries of Custer National Forest. The cave's one entrance is high on a sandstone cliff face and measures about 20 feet (6.1 m) high. The total depth of the cave is 300 feet (91 m). The main chamber of the cave measures 16 ft (4.9 m) wide and 39 ft (12 m) deep, with a 10 ft (3.0 m) high ceiling. It is part of the Ludlow Division within the Laramie Formation, which was created during the Late Cretaceous. Ludlow Cave was first discovered and inhabited by various Native American tribes and their ancestors. Some rock art suggests the Cheyenne may have visited the site. George Armstrong Custer visited the site on July 11, 1874, as part of his Black Hills Expedition through western South Dakota. The group's guide was an Arikara man named Goose. It and the town of Ludlow itself were subsequently named after the expedition's engineering officer, Major William Ludlow. The first archaeologist to visit the site was George Will, who published his findings in 1909. W.H. Over carried out an excavation in 1920 and uncovered hundreds of artifacts such as stone tools and other lithics, bones, and shell jewelry. Ludlow Cave is a sacred site to multiple Native American peoples, including the Arikara, Hidatsa, Crow, Cheyenne, Assiniboine, and Siouan tribes. Several tribes of the Missouri River area believed Ludlow Cave was a portal through which game, particularly bison, entered from the spirit world to populate the vast herds on the Great Plains. The rock art inside and around Ludlow Cave varies in age from prehistoric to modern. Much of it consists of big game animals like bison. Hoofprint impressions are also located near the site and likely date to 1300–1700 AD. Other depictions are of humans or other animals. Many of these drawings resemble other local petroglyphs, such as that found at a site near Mobridge. Some of the artwork is found outside the cave in the surrounding area, on cliff faces and rocks around the site.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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