March—Bear Lodge Butte/Devil’s Tower

Most Americans remembered this volcanic upthrust as the Mother Ship’s landing pad in director Steven Spielberg’s 1977 science-fiction classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the research group assigned to background the site were aware that Kiowa Indian tradition called the 867-foot stump T’sou’a’e, or Aloft on the Rock. It was the departure location for the early period in Kiowa history that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist N. Scott Momaday called “the setting out.” From the high plains their ancestors migrated south to ultimately reach the area of Rainy Mountain in western Oklahoma where their reservation is still found today.
      Collecting testimonies and probing archives they learned of the tower’s continuing importance to Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Shoshone, Crow, and Arapaho. Although an 1858 mapmaker had used its Lakota designation, Mato Teepee or Bear’s Lodge, since Colonel Richard Dodge’s 1876 book on the Black Hills, it had been known as Devil’s Tower to tourists, photographers, and mountain climbers.
      In all of the native stories its importance revolved around its role as a sanctuary. A group of children was playing together (the Kiowa version described seven sisters and a brother). A monster bear attacked them (the Kiowa had the brother himself transforming into the beast). Running for their lives, they arrived at a giant tree stump. It spoke to them: “Climb up on me.” Once they were on top, the stump began to grow, leaving the bear pawing at them and raking its sides with his claws, the marks of which remain today. On the summit the children were finally safe. The Kiowa say the sisters then ascended into the sky to become the constellation known as the Big Dipper—or Ursa Major, “the greater bear.”
      In 1893, the high rock began attracting visitors who conceived of wilderness as an obstacle or opponent against which to test themselves. That was when a local rancher named William Rogers hammered wooden pegs into its basaltic fissures and climbed up to plant an American flag on the 1.5-acre crest. The temptation of Rogers’ ladder introduced what Indians would derogatorily call a “multiple abuse” policy. The tower won presidential approval in 1906 when Theodore Roosevelt, renowned for trophy hunting in the Black Hills, decreed it the nation’s first national monument. After Indians protested that they had prior interest in the place, the U.S. Park Service hired an anthropologist to assert in 1934 that “it is extremely unlikely that any one tribe has been in the area of Devil’s Tower National Monument for a sufficiently long time for it to have occupied an important place in their lives or their religion and mythology.”
      The tower continued to attract stunts, like the parachutist in 1941 who dropped on the summit but had no idea how to get down. For six days air drops fed and clothed him until he rappelled into a crowd that laughed him out of the park. Spielberg’s film raised attendance. While only 312 climbers ascended in 1970, a dozen years later more than sixty climbing routes, requiring metal pitons and rings, led over 12,000 enthusiasts up its vertical walls.
      Complaining about the climbing craze, some environmentalists cited the ecological sage Aldo Leopold: “The trophy-recreationist has peculiarities that in subtle ways contribute to his own undoing. To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate.” The Black Hills also became a prime attraction for workshops on wilderness canoeing as a religious experience, “vision quests” for juvenile delinquents, and other self-improvement adventures.
      In the early 1990s, three years of talks between park officials, Indians, environmentalists, and some climbers produced a voluntary climbing ban every June. But when park officials tried to enforce the month as exclusively for Indian use, commercial climbing guides, supported by a States-rights foundation, sued for the right to go up whenever they wanted. In June 1996, a district court judge in Cheyenne, Wyoming, decided in their favor. Unlike Mount Rushmore ten miles away, where climbing was absolutely forbidden, now the tower’s rangers could only plead that climbers respect Indian religious sentiments during one sacred month. However, in the opinion of Dave Rupert, a National Park Service ethnographer sympathetic to Indian sentiment, both Rushmore and the tower were better described as central cultural sites. “The judge and the climbers see it as ‘religion’ but Native Americans don’t make a distinction between secular and sacred. They call it ‘sacred’ because they figure it will make more sense to us—it fits our lexicon.”