This tall dark tower emerges as you drive towards it.
There is nothing like it in the surrounding area.
The rock has a grayish, even a greenish gray color.
And so as you approach Devil’s Tower, it’s a distinct stark contrast to the sort of tans and browns of the surrounding sedimentary rocks.
Something is deeply wrong with Devil’s Tower.
Not wrong in the way a ghost story is wrong.
Wrong in the way a word is wrong when it is placed on the wrong thing and then repeated for a century until almost nobody notices.
It rises hundreds of feet out of the Wyoming grassland.
A gray monolith with sides like a bundle of stone rods.
And it has held the attention of scientists, travelers, and native communities for generations.
For roughly 20 native nations, it is not a landmark at all.
It is a place of ceremony.
Stories passed down for centuries tell of strange events, sacred traditions, and warnings tied to this one rock.
So, what have these communities known about Devil’s Tower all along?
And why does the name on the map say something so different from the name in their memory?
Stay with me.
We are going to trace how a sacred place may have been renamed by a mistake.
How a pillar of cooled magma rose out of the ground.
Why giant bears are said to have scarred its walls.
Who first wrote it into the record and who dared to climb it.
The name that turned a sacred place into a controversy.
There is something unusual about Devil’s Tower, and it is not only the massive rock standing over the Wyoming plane.
For generations, the place has carried a meaning far larger than its shape.
To many Native American communities, it is a sacred site tied to traditional stories, ceremonies, and spiritual belief.
Yet, the name most people know has become one of the longest running fights over a place name in the United States.
The formation was officially given the name Devil’s Tower in 1906, the year it became a national monument.
But native communities have long argued that the name grew out of a misunderstanding.
According to the history behind the renaming campaign, the original native name was mistransated as something close to bad gods tower.
Then, as the story goes, a clerical slip dropped the apostrophe, turning the phrase into bad gods tower.
Over time, it was trimmed into the name used today, Devil’s Tower.
On paper, that looks like a small error.
For the communities connected to the place, the consequences were enormous.
Imagine having a place your ancestors held sacred and then watching it be given a name that suggests the opposite of everything it stands for.
Instead of reflecting the spiritual traditions around the site, the name Devil’s Tower created a link with evil and devil worship.
For native people who still treat the area as holy, that is not just an old naming mistake.
It is a painful reminder of how outsiders misread indigenous history.
That is why the argument is about far more than replacing a sign.
Native American citizens, among them, the Lakota spiritual leader, Chief Arval looking have supported restoring a name tied to the area’s native past, Bear Lodge.
The name connects to the traditions and legends around the enormous rock and supporters say it better reflects the site’s cultural and spiritual importance.
In Lakota, the place is remembered as Mato Tipila which translates as Bear Lodge.
And there is another important thing to understand.
The push to change the name does not come from one person or one community.
Dozens of native nations have ties to the site, and for many of them, it remains a place of worship and ceremony.
That makes the modern name especially tangled.
Visitors arrive and see a magnificent geological feature.
They take photographs, walk the trails, and marvel at the towering columns.
Native communities see a place with a much deeper history.
Its importance did not begin when the federal government drew a monument boundary around it.
The traditions came long before the name ever appeared on a map.
The dispute eventually reached the US board on geographic names, the federal body that decides official geographic names.
Supporters argue that the current name is offensive because of its religious and cultural implications and that the historically significant name Bear Lodge should return.
But changing an official place name is rarely simple.
The campaign has run into resistance from some Wyoming politicians who have opposed renaming the landmark.
That resistance has turned what could have been a routine naming matter into a larger struggle over history, native rights, cultural respect, and who gets to decide how a sacred place is identified.
There is a useful comparison here.
In 2015, the federal government restored the name Denali to North America’s tallest peak, replacing Mount McKinley, a name that had been officially used since 1917, and that Alaska natives had long opposed.
It shows that such changes are possible.
It also shows that they can take decades.
Because Wyoming’s officials have resisted, supporters of the change have looked above the state level.
They have sought a decision from the highest levels of the federal government, the president, the secretary of the interior or Congress.
And that leaves a question that reaches far beyond the name printed on a map.
If the name of this landmark was born from a misunderstanding of native language and history, should the name the world knows today remain?
Because the mystery of Devil’s Tower is not only about the strange rock.
It is also about the history hidden behind its name and the traditions that have survived around it for centuries.
The name hides one story.
But what created this stone giant in the first place?
The strange stone giant rising from Wyoming?
Long before Devil’s Tower became a national monument, before climbers began to work their way up its walls, and before tourists started photographing it from the grass, something extraordinary was already taking place beneath the ground.
Today, the tower rises sharply from the rolling country of northeastern Wyoming.
Its enormous stone walls loom over the valley of the Bellforch River, a sight that seems out of place.
The surrounding land is open and gently rolling.
Yet in the middle of it stands a single colossal column of rock.
The tower rises 867 ft from its base.
A giant stone structure in the grasslands.
Measured from the river below, the total height is well over 1200 ft.
Its summit sits at about 5,112 ft above sea level.
It was not built by humans.
Its story began roughly 50 million years ago during the Eioene epoch when molten rock pushed upward through ancient layers of sedimentary rock.
That magma never reached the surface.
It became trapped underground, slowly cooling and hardening into a vast mass of ignous rock.
At first, nothing looked like the tower we know.
The hardened magma lay buried beneath softer layers of sedimentary rock.
For millions of years, those layers were attacked by wind, rain, rivers, and freezing temperatures.
Slowly, the soft rock disappeared, and as it disappeared, the far harder ignous rock beneath it was uncovered.
That is how the tower began to emerge.
Geologists describe the rock itself as phonolyte pfery, an ignous rock that cools into dense hard stone.
It is that hardness that let it outlast everything that surrounded it.
The rest of the landscape wore away.
The tower stayed.
But the most remarkable part of the formation is not only its size.
It is the pattern covering its walls.
Look closely and you will see hundreds of huge vertical columns running up its sides.
They rise like giant stone pillars, creating deep grooves and ridges that make the tower look almost manufactured.
They formed as the magma cooled.
As the molten rock lost heat, it contracted and that shrinking put stress on the hardening material causing it to crack.
Those cracks grew into long nearly vertical fractures.
The process is known as columner jointing.
The cracks can form polygon patterns, and six-sided or hexagonal columns are especially common.
Similar formations exist elsewhere.
At the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland and at Devil’s Post Pile in California, cooled lava has split into columns, too.
But the columns at Devil’s Tower are striking because of their scale, their regularity, and the way they cover the entire formation.
Some individual columns are about 6 to 10 ft across, and they are not stubby pillars.
Many extend hundreds of feet upward, creating the walls that define the monument.
From the ground, they can seem impossible to take in.
They run side by side from the base toward the summit, giving the tower the look of a gigantic bundle of stone rods pushed up from the earth.
In some places, the edges are astonishingly straight.
In others, weathering has cracked and reshaped the rock into ledges and uneven surfaces.
The longer you look, the stranger it becomes.
There is also a detail hidden in how the tower came to be.
It was not a giant piece of rock that appeared overnight.
Its present form is the result of millions of years of geological change.
The magma formed deep underground.
It cooled and fractured.
Then the surrounding rock slowly wore away in a process that worked almost like a natural excavation.
Layer after layer of softer material vanished while the harder ignous rock remained around the base.
You can still see the evidence of that long work.
A skirt of broken columns, some of them as large as small cars, lies in a heap of rubble at the foot of the tower.
Columns have been breaking off for a very long time, and they are still falling.
In some areas, the tower reaches more than 1,200 ft above its surroundings, which adds to the feeling that it shoots out of the landscape.
Standing beneath it, the scale is hard to take in.
The columns stretch upward for hundreds of feet, and the summit hangs far above the plains.
And yet, despite all of this geological complexity, the scientific explanation is only half the story.
For geologists, Devil’s Tower is a remarkable example of an ignous formation and a record of Earth’s deep past.
Its columns hold clues about how molten rock behaved as it cooled underground.
But for many Native American nations, the formation has another identity entirely.
It is Bear Lodge.
And that name is tied to stories and traditions that existed long before geologists studied the rock or the federal government declared it a monument.
This is where the story becomes more complicated.
There are really two ways of seeing the same massive formation.
One looks at the age of the rock, the movement of magma, erosion and columner jointing.
The other looks at generations of stories, ceremonies, and spiritual belief tied to the place.
Neither changes the physical structure of the tower.
But they reveal very different ways of understanding what it means.
That is why devil’s tower cannot be understood just by looking at a photograph or reading a list of measurements.
The stone tells one story.
The people who have regarded it as sacred for generations tell another.
And where those two histories meet, a rock in the Wyoming grasslands becomes a place where geology, ancient tradition, history, and modern exploration all collide.
But what ancient stories explain the strange marks covering the tower.
The ancient bear stories hidden in the tower.
Long before visitors arrived with cameras, climbing gear, or hiking boots, native communities had been telling stories about the strange formation for generations.
The stories do not all follow the same path.
Different nations have their own versions, characters, and details.
But many share one powerful idea, a giant bear, people in danger, and a rock that rises toward the sky.
One well-known version comes from the Kyoa and Lakota traditions.
In the story, several young girls were out playing when they noticed enormous bears coming toward them.
The animals began to chase them and the girls had almost nowhere to run.
They ran until they reached a rock.
With the bears closing in, they climbed onto it.
Realizing they could not outrun the animals, they dropped to their knees and prayed to the great spirit for help.
Their prayer changed everything.
The rock began to rise.
It pushed upward out of the ground, carrying the girls higher and higher into the sky.
The bears tried to follow, but the sides had become too steep.
In desperation, they clawed at the stone, and their enormous claws left deep marks down its sides.
Those long vertical lines are still visible on the tower today.
In the end, the girls reached the heavens.
According to this version, they were transformed into the stars of the Plleades, the famous cluster in the night sky.
That detail ties the story to the landscape in an even deeper way.
The girls were not just rescued and carried off.
They became part of the sky itself.
When people look at the Pletes, the story links what is happening in the heavens with what happened at Bear Lodge on Earth.
But it is not the only bear story tied to the tower.
Another version tells of two Sue boys who wandered far from their village.
While they were away, they met a massive bear named Mato.
This was no ordinary bear.
The story describes an enormous creature with claws as large as tepee poles.
When the bear saw the boys, he wanted to eat them.
They knew they were in serious danger and had almost no chance of escape on their own.
So they prayed to Wakan Tanka, the creator, and asked for help.
Again, the answer came through the rock.
The boys were lifted onto a huge stone formation out of the bear’s reach.
Mau tried to climb after them.
He circled the rock, searching for a way up.
Every attempt failed.
As the giant bear struggled against the sides, his claws scratched deep into the stone.
The marks he left became part of the story of how the strange lines on Devil’s Tower came to be.
At last, Mauto gave up.
Disappointed and exhausted, he wandered away and came to rest east of the Black Hills at the place now known as Bear.
But the boys still had to get down.
In this telling, an eagle named Juan Blee helped them leave the rock and return safely to their village.
That legend has been preserved in paint.
A painting of the story by the artist Herbert A.
Collins hangs above the fireplace in the Devil’s Tower visitor center.
But perhaps the most important thing to understand is that there is no single Native American story that explains Devil’s Tower.
Different communities have passed down different versions and one Cheyenne version takes the story in a darker direction.
In that telling, a giant bear pursues several girls and kills most of them.
Only two sisters escape.
The bear keeps following them.
So, they return home and tell two boys what happened.
The boys learn that the bear can be killed only by an arrow shot through the underside of its foot.
So, they make a plan.
The sisters lead the bear toward Devil’s Tower and trick it into believing they have climbed the rock.
The bear follows again and again, trying to climb the steep sides.
Each time it gets close, it slides back down.
And each time it falls, its claws tear into the stone.
Once more, the deep marks on the tower become part of the story.
The boys try to shoot the bear through the foot.
They come close, but the shot does not kill it.
Finally, the bear is frightened away when an arrow comes dangerously near its left foot.
Then something unusual happens.
The arrow keeps going upward and never comes back down.
Like the story of the girls turned into stars, this version links the events at the tower to something beyond the ordinary world.
Then there is perhaps the most intriguing story of all from a northern Cheyenne man named Wooden Leg.
Wooden Leg is remembered as a Cheyenne warrior who fought at the Battle of the Little Bigghorn in 1876.
In the 1930s, he told his life story to the writer Thomas Marque, and it was published as a warrior who fought Kuster.
In it, he recounted something an old man had told him as they traveled near Devil’s Tower sometime around 1866 to 1868.
According to the tale, an indigenous man once chose to sleep at the base of Bear Lodge beside a buffalo head.
When he woke the next morning, something impossible had happened.
Both the man and the buffalo head had been carried to the top of the rock.
He was stranded hundreds of feet above the ground with no obvious way down.
He spent another day and night up there without food or water.
At last he prayed through the day and fell asleep.
When he woke again, he was back on the ground, but the buffalo head was not.
It remained at the top of the tower near the edge.
The old man told Wooden Leg that he could clearly see the buffalo head through his spy glass.
There was another reason the story stood out.
At that time, Devil’s Tower had never been climbed.
So, how could a Buffalo Head have reached the summit?
For the northern Cheyenne, the detail carried special weight because the buffalo head was no ordinary object.
Buffalo held an important place in Cheyenne’s spiritual tradition, and sacred buffalo objects were kept in ceremonial spaces linked to the great medicine.
That makes this more than an odd tale about an unexplained object on top of a rock.
It ties Devil’s Tower directly to the spiritual world described in northern Cheyenne tradition.
The bear stories did not die with the generations that first told them.
Their influence reached into modern native literature and culture.
The Kyoa writer N.
Scott Maday for example was given the name Soai Thali meaning rock tree boy by a Kaioa elder named Pod Lok.
The name tied Madeay directly to the bare tradition around Devil’s Tower.
His parents later took him to the site, strengthening the link between the child, his name, and the ancient story.
Made carried the bear myth into his own work.
In his 1989 novel, the ancient child, the legend of the bear became a central underlying theme.
He had already won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, the first Native American writer to receive it.
In his book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, he retold Kaioa stories of origin, including the tale of the Sisters and the Rock.
That tells us something important.
These stories are not simply explanations for odd scratches on stone.
They have lasted because the tower stays tied to identity, memory, spirituality, and the long chain of storytelling.
To a visitor, those vertical lines may look like the result of erosion and cracking.
To geologists, they are explained by the cooling and fracturing of ancient magma.
But within native tradition, those same marks carry another meaning.
They are reminders of bears that tried to climb a sacred rock of people who called for help and of the link between earth and sky.
That is what makes Bear Lodge so fascinating.
The rock has not changed.
The stories around it have survived for generations.
And when you stand at the base of Devil’s Tower and look up at those enormous columns, you are looking at the same strange walls that inspired these traditions long before modern science gave them a geological explanation.
So when did outsiders first discover this sacred place?
The expedition that put Devil’s Tower on the map?
Long before it became a famous national monument, the Great Rock was already known to the native communities who lived in and moved through the region.
For the outside world, though, it was almost entirely undocumented.
It is possible that fur trappers reached the area before any official expedition did, but no surviving written record confirms that they visited Devil’s Tower.
That means the first clearly documented non-indigenous visitors came much later and their arrival was tied to one of the great expeditions of the American West.
In 1859, members of Captain William F.
Reynold’s expedition to Yellowstone encountered the massive rock.
The expedition was part of a broader effort to explore and record the western territories at a time when the American government and its scientists were growing curious about the geography of the region.
The geologist on that expedition was Ferdinand V.
Hayden, who would go on to become one of the most important surveyors of the West and a driving force behind the creation of Yellowstone National Park.
For the people on the expedition, the tower would have been an extraordinary sight.
Imagine crossing the open Wyoming landscape and suddenly seeing a huge rock formation lifted hundreds of feet above the plane.
Its shape and vertical columns made it unlike almost anything else around.
But the expedition did more than change how outsiders saw the formation.
It began the process of placing it into official written records.
16 years later in 1875, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge led an Office of Indian Affairs Scientific Survey Party into the area.
During this expedition, Dodge gave the formation the name that would become famous around the world, Devil’s Tower.
That name would later become the center of a major controversy because of its connection to native history and the belief that it came from a mistransation of the site’s original name.
But at the time, it simply entered the records and gradually stuck to the landmark.
As more Americans heard about the unusual formation, attention turned to protecting it.
By the late 19th century, the United States government was increasingly setting aside remarkable landscapes.
Devil’s Tower stood out, not just because of its size, but because of its distinctive geological structure.
In 1892, the area was set aside as a forest reserve.
That was an important step in the site’s official history.
But a bigger change came 14 years later.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the law that created the National Monument System, the Antiquities Act.
Devil’s Tower was chosen as the very first site to receive that designation.
On September 24th, 1906, it became the first national monument in the United States that gave Devil’s Tower a unique place in American conservation history.
Today, national monuments protect landscapes, archaeological sites, historic places, and other features of national importance.
But Devil’s Tower was the first major test of this new approach to preserving remarkable places.
There is an interesting contrast at the heart of this story.
Long before the federal government protected Devil’s Tower, native peoples already had their own reasons to consider the place important.
Its spiritual and cultural meaning existed independent of any government recognition.
When the United States declared the area a national monument, it did not create the importance of Devil’s Tower.
It formally recognized the importance of a place that had mattered to people for generations.
That distinction matters when we look at the monument today.
For many visitors, the story starts in 1906.
For native communities, it reaches much further back.
The government may have been the first to give Devil’s Tower a formal federal status, but it was not the first to give the place meaning.
Perhaps that is one of the most fascinating parts of its history.
The same rock was being understood in completely different ways long before the modern monument existed.
The tower has also found a place in popular memory.
In 1977, Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind used Devil’s Tower as the setting for its climax and brought the rock to millions of people who had never heard of it.
But once it was mapped, who dared to climb its sacred walls?
The climbers who reached a sacred summit.
For most people standing at the base of Devil’s Tower, the summit seems impossibly far away.
The walls rise straight up, split by long cracks and narrow columns that reach toward the top.
Yet, people have been finding ways up those walls for more than a century.
The first known ascent happened on July 4th, 1893, and it did not use modern climbing equipment.
Two local ranchers, William Rogers and Willard Ripley, came up with a far simpler idea.
They built a wooden ladder directly onto the tower by driving wooden pegs into cracks in the rock face.
The pegs held wooden boards, forming a crude ladder that let them work their way upward.
It was an astonishing achievement for its time, and it was timed to a celebration.
The Fourth of July ascent drew a crowd, and the ladder stayed in use for years afterwards.
Some of those original wooden pegs remained in the tower for decades, and visitors walking the 1.3 mi tower trail have been able to see some of the remnants in the rock.
For roughly the next 30 years, climbers continued using the ladder to reach the summit.
Eventually, though, the wooden structure fell into disrepair.
Then, climbing at Devil’s Tower entered a completely different era.
In 1937, the climber Fritz Wesner together with William P.
House and Lawrence Coven completed the first ascent using modern climbing techniques.
Whisner, a German-B born climber who had immigrated to the United States, was already respected as one of the best in the world.
His climb was notable because he did almost the entire route without relying on fixed equipment.
He placed only one piece of fixed gear, a peton, and later said he regretted using it because he believed it was unnecessary.
But Devil’s Tower would soon become famous for a very different kind of ascent.
In 1941, a man named George Hopkins decided to land on top of the tower by parachute.
He had no permission.
The stunt came from a bet and was meant to win publicity.
Hopkins parachuted successfully onto the summit, but getting down turned out to be far harder than getting there.
His plan was to have a 1,000 ft rope dropped to him after he landed, which he would use to descend.
There was just one problem.
The package carrying the equipment did not stay where it was meant to.
It held the rope, a sledgehammer, and a car axle that Hopkins planned to drive into the rock as an anchor.
But the package slid over the edge of the tower.
Hopkins was stranded.
Another attempt was made to send equipment to him, but the weather quickly became a serious problem.
Rain and strong winds tangled and froze the rope.
Hopkins decided the equipment could not be used.
Then the weather got even worse.
For 6 days, he stayed on top of Devil’s Tower, exposed to cold, rain, and winds reaching around 50 mph.
What began as a publicity stunt had become a dangerous rescue.
Finally, a mountain rescue team led by Jack Durrence reached him.
Durance had already climbed Devil’s Tower in 1938, so he knew how hard it could be.
The rescue drew wide attention and became a major news story.
But Hopkins ordeal was not the end of the tower’s climbing history.
Quite the opposite.
Over the following decades, climbing grew steadily more popular.
By 1994, roughly 1.3% of the monument’s 400,000 annual visitors were climbing the tower.
That may sound like a small share, but it represented thousands of people trying to scale the enormous rock.
Today, climbers can choose from many established routes across the tower’s different faces.
They follow the cracks and columns that naturally break up the otherwise steep walls.
One of the best known is the Durant route, established in 1938 and named for Jack Durant.
Some routes are fairly approachable for experienced climbers, while others are considered extremely difficult.
But there is a problem that has nothing to do with how hard the climb is.
For several plains nations, Devil’s Tower is not just a challenging piece of rock.
It is sacred.
The Lakota, Cheyenne, Kyoa, and other native communities have spiritual and cultural ties to the site.
Ceremonies are held around the monument, and some Native American leaders see climbing the tower itself as a desecration of a sacred place.
That conflict led the National Park Service in the 1990s to ask climbers to voluntarily refrain from climbing during the month of June when many ceremonies are held.
The policy was challenged in court by climbers and it was upheld.
It remains one of the best known attempts to balance recreation with native religious practice on public land.
Many visitors also see colorful cloth bundles tied to trees near the base.
They are prayer offerings left by native people and visitors are asked to leave them alone.
So, what are your thoughts about Devil’s Tower?
Let us know in the comments below.
In the end, Devil’s Tower remains a place of ancient stories, sacred traditions, and unanswered questions.
Its towering rock reveals one history, while native tradition reveals another.
The debate over its meaning goes on today.
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