Relayhorse e-magazine March 2018 RHeM mayl 2018 5 8 18 FINAL | Page 9

The History of
DEVILS TOWER
NATIONAL MONUMENT
BY NANCY HARRISON
Is Tied to Native
AMERICANS
Devils Tower also known as Bear Lodge Butte is located
east of Gillette above the Belle Fourche River, It rises
dramatically 1,267 feet above the river and is part of the
Black Hills.
Devils Tower was the first National Monument in the US
There are visitor services and a campground located at
the Monument. About 400,000 people visit Devils Tower
each year, about 1% of them climbing the Tower made fa-
mous by the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
Devil’s Tower is a very worthwhile site to visit when in
Gillette.
There are many stories from Native American sources
about Devil’s Tower and it is considered by many Nations
to be sacred to many plains tribes, including the Lako-
ta, Cheyenne and Kiowa. Because of this, many Indian
leaders objected to climbers ascending the monument,
considering this to be a desecration. The climbers argued
that they had a right to climb the Tower, since it is on
federal land. A compromise was eventually reached with
a voluntary climbing ban during the month of June when
the tribes are conducting ceremonies around the mon-
ument. Approximately 85% of climbers honor the ban
and voluntarily choose not to climb the Tower during the
month of June.
According to the Native American tribes of the Kiowa
and Lakota, a group of girls went out to play and were
spotted by several giant bears, who began to chase them.
In an effort to escape the bears, the girls climbed atop a
rock, fell to their knees, and prayed to the Great Spirit to
save them. Hearing their prayers, the Great Spirit made
the rock rise from the ground towards the heavens so
that the bears could not reach the girls. The bears, in an
effort to climb the rock, left deep claw marks in the sides
which are the marks which appear today on the sides of
Devils Tower.
Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne, relates another
legend told him by an old man as they were traveling
together past the Devils Tower around 1866–1868. An
Indian man decided to sleep at the base of Bear Lodge
next to a buffalo head. In the morning he found that both
he and the buffalo head had been transported to the top
of the rock by the Great Medicine with no way down. He
spent another day and night on the rock with no food or
water. After he had prayed all day and then gone to sleep,
he awoke to find that the Great Medicine had brought
him back down to the ground but left the buffalo head at
the top near the edge.
The buffalo head gives this story special significance for
the Northern Cheyenne. All the Cheyenne maintained
in their camps a sacred teepee to the Great Medicine
containing the tribal sacred objects. In the case of the
Northern Cheyenne, the sacred object was a buffalo head.
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