Custer

Gold had been pulled from Jordan Creek since Sylvester Jordan and Captain Dudley Varney found placers there in 1870, and sister town Bonanza — founded 1877 by Charles Franklin, with baseball and croquet fields, a watchmaker's shop, and piped community wells — was the district's first center. Custer was founded in early 1879 after the General Custer strike; town lots were laid out by Nordoff and Blick and given to anyone who would build, and Samuel Holman and Doc Adair put up the first cabin. The camp became a town of more than a hundred buildings on one long street: schoolhouse, jail, Miner's Union Hall, post office, a Chinatown at the lower end, and a baseball team.

Fires gutted Bonanza in 1889 and again in 1897, and the merchants moved downhill to Custer, which peaked at about 600 residents in 1896. The mines played out one by one; business slumped by 1903 and the last major operation closed in 1911, and Custer went quiet. The Challis National Forest took the site in 1966, the district entered the National Register in 1981 — though only seven buildings retain enough integrity to count as contributing — and since 1990 it has been managed as part of the Land of the Yankee Fork Historic Area. The schoolhouse serves as the museum; the Empire Saloon sells gifts and refreshments in season.

The second cemetery above town — Boot Hill, nine-tenths of a mile past the main graveyard — holds exactly three graves and a sign admitting a grisly mystery. The documented bones of it: realtor Richard King was killed in an argument with a business partner. His widow Lizzie and a friend, Charles Franklin, bought three burial plots — presumed to be for Richard and, eventually, themselves. Instead Lizzie married Bonanza newcomer Robert Hawthorne. Lizzie and Hawthorne were subsequently found dead. Franklin left the area and was later found dead in his cabin, clutching a locket containing Lizzie's photograph.

Whether Franklin was a double murderer and then his own last victim is the question the sign poses and declines to answer. Three plots, three occupants, and one piece of jewelry doing all the narrative work.

The usual ghost-town reports attach to Custer — figures in doorways, movement in the Empire Saloon after hours, voices along a main street that has been silent since 1911 — filed by visitors and interpretive staff rather than any single famous event. The Yankee Fork dredge down the road ran into the 1950s, which means the district's last industrial noise died out within living memory. The record is a snowslide, two fires, and a locket. The lore is a town that outlived its general's reputation and kept everything else.