Only two deeply carved pictures were removed and then were sent to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. If they could have been removed properly they were nearly perfectly carved heads. What was surprising was a number of human faces in very strong bas-relief. The pictographs were not found beyond 50 feet back in the cave, where the line of penetration of sunlight stops. Also symbols of various sorts, including totemic signs, which perhaps were pictures of various conceptions of "waken" (Indian Medicine Men). The large variety of subjects in the pictographs showed animals such as deer, dogs and horses.
![the cave buffalo the cave buffalo](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u9N1LXEpQww/TlZu6Nt0VUI/AAAAAAAACNU/N8UdTY0XbrM/s1600/Wind+Cave+NP+Buffalo+01.jpg)
Huge blocks of sandstone had broken off and fallen from the walls, but many of the fallen slabs showed traces of the pictographs. At one time the entrance walls were covered with these, according to men who had visited the spot 30 years earlier. On the walls of the cave were found pictographs of Indian carvings. Will of Bismarck, ND, with a small group of men, explored the Ludlow Cave and surrounding area in September 1908. The soldiers looted the sacred offerings and scrawled their initials over ancient art. The soldiers found rude scrawlings on the walls and heaps of arrows, moccasins and tools littering the floor of the cave entrance.
The cave buffalo full#
Goose had described the cave as full of bones, its walls covered with magical images. 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. Ludlow Cave is located four miles southwest of Ludlow, SD, just inside the Custer National Forest boundary. 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. 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.
![the cave buffalo the cave buffalo](http://www.johnsonbiosignatureslab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/buffalo-cave.png)
Custer on his expedition through the Black Hills and what is now western South Dakota. William Ludlow, the engineering officer who accompanied Lt. Ludlow Cave and the small town of Ludlow, SD, both got their name from Maj. Marker erected by: Harding County Chamber of Commerce Location of marker: Canam Hwy (US-85/SD-20), Centennial Park, Buffalo