April 4, 2002

Plains Folk: Devil’s Tower

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

"There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil's tower is one of them." So writes N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winner, Kiowa.

He goes on to say, speaking of the times when the Kiowa dwelt on the northwestern plains, "Two centuries ago, because they could not do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of the rock."

Last Sunday my companion and I walked, quietly, around Devil's Tower. There was new snowfall, but the day was still, comfortable. We met few people. Only one climbing party, composed of Germans, was scaling the rock. Now and then they shouted climber lingo to one another.

That phrase of Momaday's, "awful quiet," keeps recurring to me. During three seasons of the year it seems impossible anymore to experience such a thing at Devil's Tower. Rock climbers are numerous and noisy, both because of the necessity of communicating with one another and because they are exuberant. Their shouts reverberate from the faces of the rock. They also are highly visible, because they wear bright clothing.

Devil's Tower, in northeastern Wyoming, on the northwestern fringe of the Black Hills, is a geological anomaly of the plains. It formed underground some 60 million years ago, when molten rock pushed up through sedimentary layers. Erosion stripped away softer materials, leaving the volcanic plug standing, serene. Altitude of summit: 5112 feet. Height of tower from its base: 867 feet. The tower's rock faces are like piped garments, comprising multiple columns of stone. Gray columns, tinged with lime-green lichen. Stunning.

The Kiowas have their story of the place, the legend of a boy who became a bear and chased his seven sisters up a tree. The tree transformed into a rock tower; the bear lunged against it, scratching cracks into its sides; and the sisters were carried into the heavens to become seven stars in the Big Dipper.

Momaday knew this story because Kiowa on the reservation in Oklahoma, who themselves never laid eyes on Devil's Tower, nevertheless recalled the story, and the place.

The Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, and other native peoples of the plains have their stories of Devil's Tower, too. Every year thousands of natives make pilgrimage to the site, there going off by themselves, away from the other visitors (some half-million a year), for their own prayers and observances. Along trails around the tower bright prayer clothes and little prayer bundles of tobacco dangle from branches.

Devil's Tower became America's first national monument, so proclaimed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. By that time there already was a tradition of whites climbing the rock. Two guys did so, with a fantastic ladder spiked into a long crack up the tower, on the Fourth of July, 1893, planting an American flag on the summit. The first white woman to ascend the tower did so two years later. The last person to climb the ladder did so in 1927. The first people to ascend the tower by rock-climbing techniques, members of the American Alpine Club of New York City, did so in 1937.

During the 1890s 4th of July picnics of ranchers and settlers took place around Devil's Tower. By the 1930s there were annual picnics of the Northern Black Hills Pioneer Association. What I'm saying is that with white occupation of the area, whites established recreational and ritual use of the site, while Indians had been confined on reservations.

By late the 20th century Indian populations on the plains had resurged, traditional and updated spiritual beliefs had crystallized, and the natives were mobile veterans of the powwow highway. They come to Devil's Tower seeking that awful quiet of which Momaday spoke. The rock remains serene, but the site is not. True believers must seek quiet in their own hearts.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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