Devils TowerAmerican Folklore Mythology

Over 20 tribal nations hold Devils Tower sacred, each with their own name and stories. The Lakota call it Mato Tipila — Bear Lodge. The Kiowa call it Tso-aa, the Tree Rock. Most stories share a common structure: children — usually girls — are chased by a giant bear. They climb onto a low rock and pray for help. The rock rises beneath them, lifting them into the sky as the bear claws furiously at its sides. The deep grooves in the tower's columnar surface are the claw marks of the bear.

In the Kiowa version, recorded by N. Scott Momaday in The Way to Rainy Mountain, the seven sisters who were lifted into the sky became the Pleiades — the seven stars. The rock kept rising until they were beyond the bear's reach, and there they remain.

This story binds together geology, astronomy, and kinship in a single narrative. The tower is the bear's claw marks. The stars are the rescued children. The landscape and the sky are part of the same story.

Devils Tower rises 867 feet above the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming. The tower is the remains of an igneous intrusion — magma that pushed into surrounding sedimentary rock roughly 50 million years ago. As the softer sedimentary layers eroded, the harder phonolite porphyry remained, forming the distinctive columnar jointing that gives the tower its appearance.

Devils Tower National Monument was the first national monument in the United States, designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The 1-mile Tower Trail loops the base. Roughly 500,000 visitors per year come to the monument.

The name 'Devils Tower' is a mistranslation. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge's 1875 expedition reportedly misinterpreted a Native name as 'Bad God's Tower,' which was shortened to Devils Tower. Multiple tribal nations and advocacy groups have sought to change the official name to Bear Lodge.

Rock climbing on Devils Tower is a source of ongoing cultural tension. The National Park Service maintains a voluntary climbing closure during June, when many tribal ceremonies take place at the site. Compliance with the voluntary closure has varied. In 1996, a commercial climbing guide challenged the June closure in court; the case was dismissed, but the friction between recreational use and sacred significance continues.

The tower appeared prominently in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which significantly increased visitor numbers but also imposed a layer of pop-culture association over the site's Indigenous significance.