Probably the first white men to traverse this area were Wilson Price Hunt and his Astorians, bound for the Pacific from the Aricara Villages at the mouth of Grand River in August 1811. Transient traders and trappers were here thereafter but left no record until in July 1874 General George A. Custer, with a notable expedition of soldiers and scientists enroute from Ft. Abraham Lincoln to the Black Hills, twice passed close to this place. Three years later, on August 14th, Major Lazelle and a detachment of the 1st Infantry, hunting Indians, camped nearby. Part of the Great Sioux reservation from 1868, the area was opened to settlement in 1876 but was not surveyed until 1893. Cattlemen from 1883 on used its free range, and in 1884 the Marquis De Mores, who sunk a fortune at Medora, operated a 150-horse, four-stagecoach line with one station here on the South Grand. Its stages ran over a 215-mile route to Deadwood from October 1884 to May 1885, but the mail contract went to the shorter Pierre-Deadwood route and the line folded up. This exact location lay in Dakota Territorial counties of Harding, Burdick, and Harding again at statehood, then Butte in 1897, and finally was organized as Harding for the third time on 17 February 1909. Harding County had originally been named in 1881 for J. A. Harding of Lawrence County, speaker of the Territorial house.