Gold had been discovered in the Sawtooth Mountains.

It was 1879, thirty years after the California Gold Rush, and dozens of people from the southern United States, had come to central Idaho seeking their fortune.

Samuel Holman was an attorney who filed one of the first gold claims in the area. He laid out the plots for a community to establish a mine. Soon after, the townsite of Custer — named for Civil War General George Armstrong Custer — was born.

Over the next 31 years, the small community attracted more than 300 people. By 1910, the town folded and quickly faded into history. By the 1960s, it was a historic site managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Today, the old ghost town is managed by a nonprofit called The Land of the Yankee Fork Historical Association. Custer Days, an annual ev

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