Mato Tipila (Devils Tower)

Many nations of the northern plains hold this rock sacred and have their own names for it. The Lakota Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge, is the one most often used in English; Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho and others have theirs. Several tell versions of a story in which the rock rose to lift children out of a bear's reach, and the flutes down its sides are where the claws went. It became the first national monument of the United States in 1906, under a name that appears to have entered the record through a nineteenth-century mistranslation, and which the nations concerned have asked without success to have changed.

Two uses of the same rock

Recreational climbing grew through the twentieth century on a formation where people come to pray, and the collision was sharpest in June, when many though not all of the ceremonies fall.

The Park Service's climbing management plan of 1995 answered it with a voluntary closure for that month rather than a ban, worked out by a group that included both climbers and tribal representatives. A climbing organisation challenged the plan. The voluntary closure survived, the Tenth Circuit ruling in Bear Lodge Multiple Use Association v. Babbitt in 2000.

Thirty years on, the Park Service reports a significant reduction in June climbing, and the Access Fund, the national climbing advocacy body, endorses the closure and the wider plan.

The awkward lesson

Devils Tower is cited constantly as proof that sacred-site accommodation can work, and it is. But the reason it works is worth being honest about. It works because it is voluntary. A request raises no establishment-clause problem, so it survives challenge; a requirement would face the objection that the government was managing public land for the benefit of a religion. The accommodation is durable precisely to the extent that it is unenforceable, and it holds because climbers have chosen to honour it.

Every attempt to give a sacred site mandatory protection of comparable strength, at the San Francisco Peaks, at Oak Flat, has failed in court. That is the pattern, and Devils Tower is the exception that shows why.

Devils Tower was the first site protected under a law written for exactly this kind of place, and its origin stories are as varied as the tribes who tell them.

The first national monument

President Theodore Roosevelt designated the tower the first US National Monument in 1906, using the newly passed Antiquities Act, a law drafted mainly to protect archaeological and natural sites from looting and unregulated development. The designation predates most of the surrounding legal framework for protecting sacred Native sites, and its use here set a template followed for over a century of subsequent monument designations.

A shared claw-mark story, told differently

Multiple tribes, including the Kiowa, Lakota and Cheyenne, hold origin stories describing the tower's vertical grooves as claw marks left by a giant bear pursuing people, often children, who were lifted to safety atop a rock that then grew upward beyond the bear's reach. The core image recurs across these traditions while names, details and surrounding narrative differ by nation, reflecting shared regional experience of the landform rather than a single original story borrowed by the others.

How the rock itself formed

Geologists generally treat the tower as an igneous intrusion, magma that pushed into surrounding sedimentary rock and cooled underground before erosion stripped away the softer rock around it, leaving the harder columnar formation standing exposed; the precise depth and process of formation remains an active subject of geological study rather than fully settled.