Devils Tower & the Black Hills

The earliest official maps label the tower Bear Lodge, a direct translation of its Lakota name, Mato Tipila, and several Plains nations tell of it in stories of a bear. The name on the signs came in 1875 from Colonel Richard Dodge, who wrote that the Indians called it Bad God's Tower and turned that into Devil's Tower. On September 24, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed it, under that name, the first national monument in the country, and tribal members have long asked that it be called Bear Lodge again. Since 1995 climbers have been asked to stay off the columns through June, when ceremonies are held around the tower, and most do.

Inyan Kara, Íŋyaŋ Káǧa to the Lakota and sacred to them, stands apart on the western edge of the Black Hills, which the 1868 treaty had set inside the Great Sioux Reservation. On July 23, 1874, George Armstrong Custer climbed it with the expedition he had led into the Hills against that treaty, and someone in his party, most likely his engineer William Ludlow, cut Custer's name and the year into a rock on the summit. Three weeks later word of the expedition's gold went out, and the rush that followed ended with the seizure of the Hills in 1877.

Sundance, the Crook County seat below the Bear Lodge Mountains, gave its name to Harry Longabaugh, who served eighteen months in its jail for stealing a horse, saddle and revolver in 1887 and came out in February 1889 as the Sundance Kid.

What to See in Devils Tower & the Black Hills

4 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Devils Tower National Monument

Hulett

A plug of gray-green igneous rock cooled into columns 40 million years ago, first climbed on a stake ladder in 1893, where a parachutist was stranded for six days in 1941.

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Towns & Gateways

Vore Buffalo Jump

Beulah

A gypsum sinkhole where hunters trapped bison for 250 years, each hunt sealed in its own layer, and the reason Interstate 90 bends south here.

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Industry & Mining

Aladdin Coal Tipple

Aladdin

The last nineteenth-century wooden coal tipple believed to stand in the country, which fed Black Hills gold smelters and is now close to falling.

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Eagle Butte Mine Overlook

Gillette

A working Powder River Basin coal mine that still takes visitors, in the basin that mines close to forty percent of the nation's coal.

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Stories from Devils Tower & the Black Hills

Devils Tower & the Black Hills rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.