Mateo Tepee

Devils Tower rises dramatically and abruptly out of the Black Hills above the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming. These Black Hills are an island in the Great Plains, the heart of the American West. The aura of this West and of its history, folklore, and legend is a fondly nurtured American treasure. Never just The West, it is rather the Scenic West, or the Old West, or the True West, and of course the Wild West. Each epithet suggests that no one can pay homage to the region without resorting to its curious mixture of the known and the unknown, of truth and myth. Here is a land of blue skies, magnificent rock formations, and a clear, dry atmosphere that easily confuses and distorts your sense of distance. It is a land of mountain views, long probing rivers, deserts, and high plains and space—great unfathomable oceans of space. The West is the archetypal outdoors whose recreation possibilities forever grip the modern imagination.

A trip to Devils Tower National Monument is a trip to Wyoming, a state fully proud of its Western traditions. Car license plates display the bucking bronco to advertise “the land of the cowboy,” a motif repeated in many public places and widely observed in the casual manner of its people.

A trip to Devils Tower is also a trip to the Black Hills, an island of life rising out of the more arid Great Plains. Devils Tower sits on the Black Hills’ western fringe and is in fact the area’s most remarkable landmark. The Tower still evokes the mystery of this land where whites feared to travel until as late as 1876, the year General George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry fought—and were annihilated—in the battle of the Little Big Horn River in Montana. This last great victory of the Sioux and Cheyenne who refused reservation life made them hunted outlaws among whites. Their relatives on reservations soon gave away the tribal lands and with this went the Indians’ last hope of remaining free to travel and hunt from their revered Black Hills base.

To speak of history in Wyoming is to speak of a mere hundred years. Events in the settlement are so recent that many residents can recite them as part of their family history. Before that are the oral histories of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Crow, and other tribes whose dates of occupation are but vaguely known.

Gold discoveries in today’s South Dakota portion of the Black Hills forced the final clash with the plains tribes. Custer had confirmed gold reports and the pressure of the excited rush that followed broke the government’s earlier treaty resolve to preserve forever the Indians’ sovereignty over the Black Hills.

Settlers carrying American civilization to the West by the overland route to California, Oregon Territory, and Mormon Utah then quickly flowed into this backwater area. As the frenzied furor over Black Hills gold diminished and mines and creeks played out, homesteaders settled on lands parceled out for ranches. Along the Belle Fourche River, where the plains Indian tribes had sometimes spent winters, a new era opened under this brooding tower of rock called Mateo Tepee.

Place names in the West can be powerfully suggestive of history, but they can also be very unreliable; Devils Tower for instance. To the Indians this singular occurrence of dramatically upthrust rock marked the dwelling place of bears, hence Mateo Tepee or “Bear Lodge.” Their stories told of lost youngsters who were chased by a giant bear and climbed on top of a rock in a last desperate effort to save themselves. The children appealed to the spirits and the rock grew up out of the ground to lift the children out of the giant bear’s reach. Versions of this story belong to different tribes, but most have in common the bear’s futile attempt to claw its way to the top. This clawing left permanent grooves on the Tower.

Colonel Richard I. Dodge apparently had not heard these stories when he entered the Black Hills in 1875. In charge of a large military escort to a scientific team, he came in violation of Indian treaty rights after Custer’s 1874 expedition which had reported gold. Dodge noted that his questions to the Indians about this “terra incognita” known as the Black Hills were met with “studied silence.” This only heightened a true explorer’s curiosity. Perhaps the Indian scouts affected a calculated silence, hoping the whites would leave. When the great rock tower first loomed in sight, they told Dodge it was named, “with proper modification by our surveyors,” the Devils Tower. In later years few could recall why this name was used.

If it was meant to scare off these white explorers and those to follow, it did not. The new wave of American settlers did not believe that natural objects held supernatural powers. No matter how awesome or unusual, science had an explanation for everything in nature, or would eventually. Devils Tower was determined to be the core of an ancient volcano, an obelisk of volcanic trachyte, with sides so straight that one “could only look upward in despair of ever planting his feet on the top,” as one geologist in Dodge’s expedition put it.

The desire to conquer and tame nature, the view that men could use up natural things and discard them without asking the spirits, differed greatly from Indian concepts. While the tools and equipment of an advanced civilization could not be resisted, the explanation white men gave for their world could never satisfy the Indians. How uncomfortable it must have been for them when they were asked to relate their tribal stories of places such as Mateo Tepee, about which there could be no “proof!” One day a man would find a way to plant his feet on top of Devils Tower, and it would be hailed as a personal feat of strength and daring having nothing to do with the spirit of the bear that dwelt within his lodge.

In the 20-year period after the opening of the Black Hills, cowmen and sheepherders discovered the hilly prairies and spacious grasslands that spread from the Belle Fourche River as far west as the Big Horn Mountains. Cattle trailed up from Texas flourished into great herds that freely roamed the open range. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad extended its line from Nebraska northwestward to Gillette, which quickly became the system’s largest shipping point. As many as 12,000 beef cattle and 40,000 head of sheep at a time waited at the railroad to be sent to eastern meatpackers. Wyoming became a state in 1890, its history already indelibly colored by the cowboy lifestyle and territorial range feuds.

Cowboy songs and stories of Western American folklore often mentioned the Belle Fourche River. The first ranchers to settle along it established small-scale cattle outfits centered about Hulett within sight of Devils Tower. These early-day settlers may not have revered the Tower as the Indians did, but neither were they disposed to see it exploited for private gain. There was enough feeling to cause Wyoming’s Senator Francis E. Warren to introduce into the U.S. Senate in July of 1892 a bill to establish Devils Tower National Park. Congressional support for the bill fizzled, but the General Land Office in Washington had already withdrawn from settlement several sections of land adjoining the Tower and the Little Missouri Buttes to the northwest. Protection of Devils Tower was at least temporarily assured.

The same year the park bill failed, two men now famous in the history of the West traveled to Devils Tower hoping against hope like any other tourists that it would match their own expectations. Photographer William H. Jackson had been commissioned by the State of Wyoming to photograph the State’s scenic attractions for the World’s Columbian Exposition the next year in Chicago. With him traveled a friend, the landscape painter Thomas Moran. Their round trip from the railhead at Gillette, by horse-drawn wagon lasted four days. Moran described the adventure in a magazine article illustrated by his drawings, and a Jackson photo of the Tower ended up in Chicago. In their one afternoon there, they had produced the first widely known visual records of Devils Tower.

Jackson and Moran’s unceremonious visit to the Tower in 1892 was undoubtedly forgotten in the rush of excitement the next year. Homesteaders, ranchers, and cowhands and their families flocked in unusual numbers to celebrate Independence Day at Devils Tower. Handbills called the Tower one of the greatest natural wonders in the United States and announced that “the rarest sight of a lifetime” would be observed at the festivities. The news obviously spread far, for more than 1,000 people made the trip.

The ballyhoo surrounded William Rogers. A local cowboy, he became, as far as anybody knew, the first human being to set foot on top of the Tower. He and a climbing partner, Willard Ripley, made the ascent by way of a wooden ladder they had worked on all that spring for the first 107 meters (350 feet) of the Tower. Those who knew the tall and raw-boned Rogers said he was never afraid of man or devil. After ceremonies on the ground, he and Ripley scrambled over the boulder field and started up the ladder with the cheers of the crowd presumably ringing in their ears. The climb took only an hour, the riskiest part of the business having been accomplished in the days preceding the event.