US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0029/00290.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 18KB | 310 lines

$Unique_ID{USH00290}
$Pretitle{25}
$Title{Devils Tower
Chapter 1  Welcome to Devils Tower}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{US Department of the Interior}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{tower
devils
national
west
first
black
hills
top
rogers
wyoming}
$Volume{Handbook 111}
$Date{1984}
$Log{Devils Tower*0029001.scf
First to Climb*0029002.scf
Hopkins Rescue*0029003.scf
First All-Woman*0029004.scf
An Aerial View*0029005.scf
}
Book:        Devils Tower
Author:      US Department of the Interior
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 111
Date:        1984

                           Overview of Devils Tower

Devils Tower National Monument is in the Black Hills of northeastern
Wyoming.  This handbook reviews the major attractions of the site, including
the volcanic rock Tower and protected prairie dog communities.  This volume
was produced by the United States Department of Interior.

Chapter 1  Welcome to Devils Tower

Mateo Tepee

     Devils Tower rises dramatically and abruptly out of the Black Hills above
the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming.  These Black Hills are an
island in the Great Plains, the heart of the American West.  The aura of this
West and of its history, folklore, and legend is a fondly nurtured American
treasure.  Never just The West, it is rather the Scenic West, or the Old West,
or the True West, and of course the Wild West.  Each epithet suggests that no
one can pay homage to the region without resorting to its curious mixture of
the known and the unknown, of truth and myth.  Here is a land of blue skies,
magnificent rock formations, and a clear, dry atmosphere that easily confuses
and distorts your sense of distance.  It is a land of mountain views, long
probing rivers, deserts, and high plains and space - great unfathomable oceans
of space.  The West is the archetypal outdoors whose recreation possibilities
forever grip the modern imagination.

[See Devils Tower: Devils Tower in the winter FRONT COVER]

     A trip to Devils Tower National Monument is a trip to Wyoming, a state
fully proud of its Western traditions.  Car license plates display the bucking
bronco to advertise "the land of the cowboy," a motif repeated in many public
places and widely observed in the casual manner of its people.

     A trip to Devils Tower is also a trip to the Black Hills, an island of
life rising out of the more arid Great Plains.  Devils Tower sits on the Black
Hills' western fringe and is in fact the areas most remarkable landmark.  The
Tower still evokes the mystery of this land where whites feared to travel
until as late as 1876, the year General George Armstrong Custer and his
cavalry fought - and were annihilated - in the battle of the little Big Horn
River in Montana.  This last great victory of the Sioux and Cheyenne who
refused reservation life made them hunted outlaws among whites.  Their
relatives on reservations soon gave away the tribal lands and with this went
the Indians last hope of remaining free to travel and hunt from their revered
Black Hills base.

     To speak of history in Wyoming is to speak of a mere hundred years.
Events in the settlement are so recent that many residents can recite them as
part of their family history.  Before that are the oral histories of the
Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Crow, and other tribes whose dates of occupation
are but vaguely known.

     Gold discoveries in today's South Dakota portion of the Black Hills
forced the final clash with the plains tribes.  Custer had confirmed gold
reports and the pressure of the excited rush that followed broke the
government's earlier treaty resolve to preserve forever the Indians'
sovereignty over the Black Hills.

     Settlers carrying American civilization to the West by the overland route
to California, Oregon Territory, and Mormon Utah then quickly flowed into this
backwater area.  As the frenzied furor over Black Hills gold diminished and
mines and creeks played out, homesteaders settled on lands parceled out for
ranches.  Along the Belle Fourche River, where the plains Indian tribes had
sometimes spent winters, a new era opened under this brooding tower of rock
called Mateo Tepee.

     Place names in the West can be powerfully suggestive of history, but they
can also be very unreliable; Devils Tower for instance.  To the Indians this
singular occurrence of dramatically upthrust rock marked the dwelling place of
bears hence Mateo Tepee or "Bear Lodge." Their stories told of lost youngsters
who were chased by a giant bear and climbed on top of a rock in a last
desperate effort to save themselves.  The children appealed to the spirits and
the rock grew up out of the ground to lift the children out of the giant
bear's reach.  Versions of this story belong to different tribes, but most
have in common the bear's futile attempt to claw its way to the top. This
clawing left permanent grooves on the Tower.

     Colonel Richard I. Dodge apparently had not heard these stories when he
entered the Black Hills in 1875.  In charge of a large military escort to a
scientific team, he came in violation of Indian treaty rights after Custer's
1874 expedition which had reported gold.  Dodge noted that his questions to
the Indians about this "terra incognita" known as the Black Hills were met
with "studied silence."  This only heightened a true explorer's curiosity.
Perhaps the Indian scouts affected a calculated silence, hoping the whites
would leave.  When the great rock tower first loomed in sight, they told Dodge
it was named, "with proper modification by our surveyors," the Devils Tower.
In later years few could recall why this name was used.

     If it was meant to scare off these white explorers and those to follow,
it did not.  The new wave of American settlers did not believe that natural
objects held supernatural powers.  No matter how awesome or unusual, science
had an explanation for everything in nature, or would eventually.  Devils
Tower was determined to be the core of an ancient volcano, an obelisk of
volcanic trachyte, with sides so straight that one "could only look upward in
despair of ever planting his feet on the top," as one geologist in Dodge's
expedition put it.

     The desire to conquer and tame nature, the view that men could use up
natural things and discard them without asking the spirits, differed greatly
from Indian concepts.  While the tools and equipment of an advanced
civilization could not be resisted, the explanation white men gave for their
world could never satisfy the Indians.  How uncomfortable it must have been
for them when they were asked to relate their tribal stories of places such as
Mateo Tepee, about which there could be no "proof!" One day a man would find a
way to plant his feet on top of Devils Tower, and it would be hailed as a
personal feat of strength and daring having nothing to do with the spirit of
the bear that dwelt within his lodge.

     In the 20-year period after the opening of the Black Hills, cowmen and
sheepherders discovered the hilly prairies and spacious grasslands that spread
from the Belle Fourche River as far west as the Big Horn Mountains. Cattle
trailed up from Texas flourished into great herds that freely roamed the open
range.  The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad extended its line from
Nebraska northwestward to Gillette, which quickly became the system's largest
shipping point.  As many as 12,000 beef cattle and 40,000 head of sheep at a
time waited at the railroad to be sent to eastern meatpackers. Wyoming became
a state in 1890, its history already indelibly colored by the cowboy lifestyle
and territorial range feuds.

     Cowboy songs and stories of Western American folklore often mentioned the
Belle Fourche River.  The first ranchers to settle along it established
small-scale cattle outfits centered about Hulett within sight of Devils Tower.
These early-day settlers may not have revered the Tower as the Indians did,
but neither were they disposed to see it exploited for private gain. There was
enough feeling to cause Wyoming's Senator Francis E. Warren to introduce into
the U.S. Senate in July of 1892 a bill to establish Devils Tower National
Park.  Congressional support for the bill fizzled, but the General Land Office
in Washington had already withdrawn from settlement several sections of land
adjoining the Tower and the Little Missouri Buttes to the northwest.
Protection of Devils Tower was at least temporarily assured.

     The same year the park bill failed, two men now famous in the history of
the West traveled to Devils Tower hoping against hope like any other tourists
that it would match their own expectations.  Photographer William H. Jackson
had been commissioned by the State of Wyoming to photograph the State's scenic
attractions for the World's Columbian Exposition the next year in Chicago.
With him traveled a friend, the landscape painter Thomas Moran. Their round
trip from the railhead at Gillette, by horsedrawn wagon lasted four days.
Moran described the adventure in a magazine article illustrated by his
drawings, and a Jackson photo of the Tower ended up in Chicago.  In their one
afternoon there, they had produced the first widely known visual records of
Devils Tower.

     Jackson and Moran's unceremonious visit to the Tower in 1892 was
undoubtedly forgotten in the rush of excitement the next year.  Homesteaders,
ranchers, and cowhands and their families flocked in unusual numbers to
celebrate Independence Day at Devils Tower.  Handbills called the Tower one of
the greatest natural wonders in the United States and announced that "the
rarest sight of a lifetime" would be observed at the festivities.  The news
obviously spread far, for more than 1,000 people made the trip.

     The ballyhoo surrounded William Rogers.  A local cowboy, he became, as
far as anybody knew, the first human being to set foot on top of the Tower. He
and a climbing partner, Willard Ripley, made the ascent by way of a wooden
ladder they had worked on all that spring for the first 107 meters (350 feet)
of the Tower.  Those who knew the tall and raw-boned Rogers said he was never
afraid of man or devil.  After ceremonies on the ground, he and Ripley
scrambled over the boulder field and started up the ladder with the cheers of
the crowd presumably ringing in their ears.  The climb took only an hour, the
riskiest part of the business having been accomplished in the days preceding
the event.

[See First to Climb: William Rogers (above right) with his wife, stepdaughter
and dog. Rogers and Willard Ripley were the first people to climb the summit]

     When they reached the top, Rogers and Ripley strung up Old Glory from a
flagpole they had somehow already managed to carry to the top!  It was a
spectacle in which many in the crowd below could claim a part.  Muslin for the
oversized flag apparently was purchased in Sundance, Wyoming, where it was
painted and sewn together by a committee of boosters.  Someone, it is said,
had tailored a patriotic climbing suit of red, white, and blue that was
presented to Rogers at ceremonies before the climb.

     Ranchers who witnessed the event said that while Rogers may indeed have
risked his neck on the Tower, he reaped an entrepreneurial bonanza afterwards.
During the daylong merriment and the dancing that evening, his wife and his
partner 5 wife ran the only refreshment stand.  The flag, which had blown
down, was cut up and sold for souvenirs, and the ladies made a small fortune.
Perhaps the boast of the handbill published that year by the Crook County
Commissioners was true: It was possible to have a better time at Devils Tower
that summer than in Chicago at the World's Fair.

     Rogers and Ripley raised a public spectacle perhaps not equalled until
the caper of "Devils Tower George" Hopkins, the subject of a 1941 Tower-top
rescue mission by alpinist Jack Durrance.  Hopkins parachuted to the top and
was stranded, keeping millions of newspaper readers in suspense over his fate
atop the isolated rock monument few had ever seen.  Durrance rescued his man
five days later.  Devils Tower again loomed in the national imagination, with
the screening of the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."  And in 1979 a
televised sports show featured George Willig, the "human fly," whose climbing
antics were beamed nationwide via space satellite.  As we entered the decade
of the 1980's the number of registered climbs of Devils Tower surpassed the
10,000 mark.  But that's jumping ahead too quickly in the chronology of this
story.

[See Hopkins Rescue: Parachutists George Hopkins, top second from left, was
rescued from the top after spending 6 days on the summit.]

[See First All-Woman: Jan Conn and Joan Shoacre were members of the first all-
woman party to climb the Tower, in 1952]

     At the turn of the century, the Tower became a natural meeting place for
people who might see each other but once a summer at a Fourth of July
celebration.  Oldtimers recall that a small, rough-cut wooden platform served
as a dance floor; the merry-go-round had seats for four children at most; and
the home-grown orator read the Declaration of Independence.  The affairs were
fun and lasted for days.  People camped at the Tower, and sometimes those who
came across the river from the east were stranded by a quick summer flood.

     In time, the harshness of the frontier softened a bit.  Towns and cities
replaced crude settlements and provided secure bases from which to look out at
the wonders of the land.  The newly arrived settlers made the West their own.
And, to compress time and events into a few words, some people began to think
about protecting some of the uniqueness of the West.

     The National Park System owes its existence to this dawning of a
conservation ethic in the late 19th century.  Yellowstone, in northwestern
Wyoming, became the first national park in 1872.  A few other tracts were set
aside as parks in subsequent years, but the preservation movement surged in
1906, when Congress passed the Antiquities Act.  The President now had the
authority to create national monuments.  Not only scenery was to remain
unspoiled in these monuments, but also priceless Indian ruins, pottery, and
projectiles and other objects of antiquity were to be protected from looting
collectors.  President Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a national goal
and used the Antiquities Act to proclaim the first eighteen national
monuments.  Devils Tower National Monument became the first, created on
September 24, 1906, giving Wyoming both the first national park and the first
national monument.

     The next campaign was for money to build a bridge over the Belle Fourche
River.  By 1916, when the local families gathered at the Tower for another
July Fourth picnic, it seemed that Congress would never appropriate money to
turn the place into a proper public resort.  A petition to Wyoming's
Congressman Frank W. Mondell complaining about washed out trails and difficult
access to the Tower was circulated among the 1916 picnickers and may have done
some good.  The next year, the newly created National Park Service directed
the building of an entrance road, soon to be improved again for auto traffic.
By the end of the 1920's Wyoming's participation in the national enthusiasm
for highway construction was showing results.  Old pathways followed by the
Sioux, later broadened for buckboard wagon and stagecoach, were now graded and
oiled for motorcars.  A trip to the West was no longer an expedition of
months: cross-country motoring had arrived.

     Through the Depression years from 1931 to 1941 the number of tourists,
vacationers, and sightseers tripled at Devils Tower.  And in the meantime, an
army of unemployed laborers and artisans, organized as the Civilian
Conservation Corps, applied themselves to public works projects throughout the
country.  At last the park received the attention its admirers said it
deserved.  CCC workers built new roads over an access bridge only a few years
old.  Overnight campgrounds were landscaped and picnic areas were provided
with tables and benches.  Formal walking trails were made for orderly hiking
excursions around the base of the Tower.  Water and electrical systems were
installed, and in 1935 a museum was built out of rough-hewn logs.  The museum,
filled with exhibits, still stands at the foot of Tower Trail and serves as a
summer visitor center, book sales outlet, and registration office for
climbers.

     Ask the average traveler to Devils Tower for his or her impressions and
invariably two things come to mind, or, more properly, stand tall.  One is the
immutable, immobile Tower; the other is the animated, lively prairie dog.  The
national monument has become one of several reserves for this beleaguered
plains inhabitant, whose communal lifestyle is profiled in Part 2 of this
handbook.  Like the Tower, it is misnamed, but so fixed is it in our minds and
experience that it will likely always remain so.  Subjected to eradication
campaigns throughout the plains area because of conflicts with livestock
enterprises, these otherwise personable rodents are protected here at Devils
Tower National Monument.

     The visitor conveniences that were so long in coming to Devils Tower are
now enjoyed by nearly 300,000 persons every year.  They come for mid-June's
display of wildflowers, or mid-September's fall colors.  They come to
challenge themselves in the tradition of William Rogers and Willard Ripley.
They come to watch the prairie dogs bustle about in near-parody of our own
busyness.  But most of all the Tower inspires a swing-by on the way east or
west, prompting some travelers to tarry for a day or two on this pleasant
plainsland.

[See An Aerial View: An aerial view discloses the tear-drop shape of the top
and the extent of the Great Plains around the Tower]