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By Root 4271 0

their spare moments when out in the grounds. I often look out of the office windows when I have a score of Senators and Congressmen with me and see them both hard at work arranging caverns or mountains, with runways for their marbles.”1 With such a crowded indoor schedule, the president lamented that he couldn’t join the lads outside to play like a prairie dog. Deadlines and commitments were getting the best of him. Much like his sons, only on a vastly larger scale, Roosevelt was preoccupied with reconfiguring landscapes (by Executive Order, that is) for the United States. Arranging for the designation of wonders, in fact, was an apt description of the Roosevelt administration’s conservation policy in 1906. No longer was Roosevelt inventorying possible western landscapes to preserve; he was actually preserving them.

Accordingly, some of Roosevelt’s indoor bureaucratic chores of 1906 were of the inspiring outdoors type. For example, paperwork was being drafted at the General Land Office to save Devils Tower in southeastern Wyoming—perhaps the strangest molten rock configuration in North America. This isolated Devil’s Tower outcropping soared over the Missouri Buttes—five dome-shaped rock formations four miles away from it—in the northwest corridor of the Black Hills. Looming over the Wyoming Valley at 1,267 feet above the river, Devils Tower looked like a huge stone tablet on which the Ten Commandments were said to have been set.

Devils Tower had no cultural features like the prehistoric dwellings in the Four Corners region that Congressman John F. Lacey and Edgar Lee Hewett wanted saved. It was a perpendicular columnar laccolith, a gray horn formed during the Triassic Period about 250 million years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed. Surrounding the main stumplike rock formation of Devils Tower were pine forests, woodlands, and grasslands—in short, an unspoiled sanctuary for teeming wildlife. Devils Tower was a sacred site to more than twenty Plains tribes, including the Arapaho, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Shoshone. They used it like an altar, a place for prayer offerings, vision quests, marriage ceremonies, and funerals.2 There was an enduring Indian legend that long ago a huge bear had clawed the tower’s side, leaving deep scratches or grooves there. This seemingly otherworldly tower served, appropriately, as a setting in the director Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To geologists, Devils Tower was an important site: an amazing formation at 5,112 feet above sea level, composed of red sandstone and maroon siltstone, with the oxidation of iron mineral causing the outer surface to look almost rust-colored. It was more difficult to climb than the Tetons (near Yellowstone) or El Capitan (in Yosemite). “There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man,” N. Scott Momaday wrote in The Way to Rainy Mountain. “Devils Tower is one of them.”3

In early 1906 Roosevelt considered how Devils Tower could be saved for posterity. Because it was only a mile wide, it didn’t seem to be large enough for a national park (although the much smaller Platt and Hot Springs were national parks). And Roosevelt didn’t want Devils Tower declared part of a national forest, because it was a “wonder,” not a utilitarian natural resource for the Forest Service to manage. Roosevelt, who was familiar with the history of the U.S. Geological Survey, knew that Colonel Richard I. Dodge had named Devils Tower in his 1876 book The Black Hills. To Dodge, it was “one of the most remarkable peaks in this or any other country.”4 Bully for Dodge! And the geologist Henry Newton had written that it was an “unfailing object of wonder.”5 Bully for Newton, too!

Devils Tower in Wyoming became Roosevelt’s first national monument, created in 1906.

Devils Tower National Monument. (Courtesy of the National Park Service)

A scholarly debate has continued for decades about whether Roosevelt actually climbed or even visited Devils Tower. Some bogus literature propagated by the tower’s boosters claims that