A geologic feature protrudes out of the rolling prairie that surrounds the Black Hills. The site is considered Sacred to the Lakota and other tribes that have a connection to the area. Hundreds of parallel cracks make it one of the finest traditional crack climbing areas in North America. Devils Tower entices us to explore and define our place in the natural and cultural world.
Protruding out of the rolling prairie that surrounds the Black Hills region, Devils Tower is a monolith of uncommon igneous rock (phonolite).
President Theodore Roosevelt used the 1906 Antiquities Act, to create the monument based on natural rather than cultural features. This site is considered a Sacred place to the Lakota and other tribes that have a connection to the Black Hills and surrounding area.
Porcupines spend a good deal of their lives stripping off the outer bark of trees to expose and eat the cambrium layer. You can see many examples of this at Devils Tower when you walk along the Tower Trail.
The columns that create Devils Tower can be 4, 5, 6, or 7 sided. Some geologists believe the last column fell 10,000 years ago. Devils Tower has been featured in several movies, including Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Devils Tower has been a sacred site for Native Americans since they happened upon it centuries ago. Different tribes have different stories, but they're all very similar. The Lakota and the Kiowa tell a tale of two young girls who, while out playing, were spotted by seveal enormous bears who began to give chase. The girls, in an attempt to escape, climbed to the top of Devils Tower, and then fell to their knees and prayed to the Great Spirit to save them as the bears began to scale the rocks behind them. The Great Spirit raised the rock to the heavens, and as the cliff grew steeper, the bears fell backwards, their claw marks as they tried to hang on being the ridges on the side of the tower. Once the rock reached the sky, the girls were turned into stars-- the constellation we know today as the Pleiades. A Sioux version has two boys being chased by a huge bear named Mato-- they climb onto the rock and pray to the creator Wakan Tanka, who raises the rock as the bear falls down the side, leaving the scratch marks. The boys are then rescued by an eagle named Wanblee, and Mato sulks off to Bear Butte, named for him. The Cheyenne version is much darker: in it, there is a large group of girls, most of whom are killed by the bear. Two escape and solicite help from two boys, who have the girls lure the bear to the top of Devil's Tower so they can shoot it on the underside of its foot with an arrow, supposedly the bear's only weak spot. As they boys fire arrows at the bear, it leaves scratch marks on the Tower, and in the end, the bear gives up and leaves.