Devils Tower: Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge, First Monument

You can see it from forty miles away on a clear morning: a flat-topped column of rock rising eight hundred sixty-seven feet above the Belle Fourche River floodplain, its fluted sides dropping in vertical hexagonal columns so regular they look engineered. They are not. They are the result of molten rock cooling slowly underground around forty million years ago, contracting into columns as it hardened. The softer sedimentary rock around it eroded away over millions of years, leaving the igneous core standing.

At least twenty Native American nations, among them the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, and Arapaho, have maintained ceremonial and spiritual relationships with this formation for thousands of years before European contact. The Lakota call it Mato Tipila: Bear Lodge. The Kiowa call it Tso-aa. Each nation carries its own origin stories for the formation; the Lakota account involves bears whose claws scored the vertical columns. These are active living traditions, not museum exhibits. Lakota elders continue to conduct ceremonies and leave prayer bundles on the rock.

On September twenty-fourth, nineteen oh six, Theodore Roosevelt designated Devils Tower the first national monument in American history under the Antiquities Act. The proclamation marked a zone of about two square miles. It did not acknowledge the existing Indigenous ceremonial relationships.

Rock climbing grew substantially at the tower through the twentieth century. By the nineteen nineties, the volume of climbers in June, the month of Lakota Sun Dance and prayer ceremonies, had become a flashpoint. A voluntary climbing closure for the month of June was implemented. A climbing organization sued the National Park Service in federal court, arguing the closure promoted religion on federal land. The court ruled against them in nineteen ninety-six. The June closure remains voluntary and widely observed.

The tower is the same shape as the one you have seen in photographs. Some forms do not need improvement.