The story
Custer grew up around the General Custer Mine and its stamp mill on the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River. Along with neighboring Bonanza, it was the center of the Yankee Fork gold rush, active from about 1877 until 1911. Around 600 people lived along its mile-long main street at the peak.
The mines and their mill drove everything, and when the ore no longer paid, the mill closed and the town emptied in the early 1910s. Decades later, an enormous gold dredge chewed its way up the valley in the 1940s and 50s, leaving the ridges of tailings that still line the road below town.
Custer is now part of Land of the Yankee Fork State Park, with a small museum in the old schoolhouse and a self-guided walk through the surviving buildings. It pairs naturally with the parked Yankee Fork dredge downstream, making the whole valley an easy half-day of Idaho mining history.
What remains today
Original frame buildings along the main street, a schoolhouse museum, and mining structures — plus the Yankee Fork gold dredge and tailings nearby.
Questions from the field
- What is there to see at Custer, Idaho?
- A preserved Yankee Fork mining town with a schoolhouse museum and self-guided trail, plus the nearby Yankee Fork gold dredge — all within Land of the Yankee Fork State Park, open in the summer season.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Custer — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Custer's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 396356
- — Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation — Land of the Yankee Fork State Park
- — Idaho State Historical Society — Yankee Fork mining district