The cave was visited by George Armstrong Custer as part of his 1874 Black Hills Expedition and was named for one of his officers, William Ludlow.
[6] George Armstrong Custer visited the site on July 11, 1874, as part of his Black Hills Expedition through western South Dakota.
[8] Ludlow Cave is a sacred site to multiple Native American peoples, including the Arikara, Hidatsa, Crow, Cheyenne, Assiniboine, and Siouan tribes.
[5] Several tribes of the Missouri River area believed Ludlow Cave was a portal through which game, particularly bison, entered from the spirit world to populate the vast herds on the Great Plains.
The lowest level was about 3 feet (0.91 m) below the modern surface and contained traces of fire, animal bones, arrowheads, tools, beads, pipes, pots, woven basketry, and other artifacts.
Over recorded at least 300 arrowheads made out of material like flint, agate, quartzite, and chalcedony; some still had the remains of the arrow shafts or fastenings attached.
[8] Based on the typography of the arrowheads, Over suggested this oldest level might have been resulted from a Rocky Mountains-based tribe, possibly Shoshone, inhabiting the cave temporarily.
[17] Archaeologist William Duncan Strong further proposed the artifacts were left by an ancestral group to the Arikara who may have arrived from modern-day Nebraska.