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By Root 4210 0

he did. At best, that is a half-truth. During his trips to the Black Hills and Bighorns in the 1880s and 1890s he did see it (geologists say it looked about the same then as it had 10,000 years prior).6 After all, the Little Missouri River flowed within twenty or so miles of it. But Roosevelt probably never stood any nearer to its base. On his Great Loop tour in 1903, his train had made stops in the Wyoming towns of Gillette, Moorcroft, and Sundance, so he probably saw Devils Tower from a distance. And he had visited the South Dakota communities of Edgemont and Ardmore on that trip—both within sight of the tower. But touch it: no. Nevertheless, as with Mount Olympus in Washington state, Roosevelt revered Devils Tower as a Wyoming site of great value. And strangely, the “Tree Rock,” as the Kiowa called it, was part of Roosevelt’s life as a rancher because its lore was persuasive throughout the Dakota Badlands.

Roosevelt wasn’t alone in his admiration for Devils Tower. It had its share of cheerleaders during the progressive era. In 1891 Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, a pleasant-looking man in his mid-forties, tried to establish “Devils Tower National Park,” introducing Bill S.3364. It was shot down by Congress. Every few years Warren would reintroduce the legislation, only to have it repeatedly rejected.7 However, Senator Warren was able to have Devils Tower classified as part of a federal timber reserve. This at least bought him some time for negotiation. Roosevelt, who was struggling to get the Grand Canyon officially declared a national park, didn’t want to have Devils Tower fail again owing to congressional indifference. But even though he had Warren on his side, politicians in Wyoming were anti–federal government. Since the 1890s, when the Boone and Crockett Club had roared against the segregation of Yellowstone National Park by the railroad company, Roosevelt had been disliked by a substantial number of Wyomingites.

What Roosevelt wanted was an executive order to save places like Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, Mount Olympus, and the Petrified Forest. And he wanted it without confronting dimwitted legislators whose insatiable craving for profit blinded them to the inspirational value of geological landmarks. Congressman Lacey—as head of the House Committee on Public Lands—ballyhooed Devils Tower’s weirdness as an asset for tourism. The nation became intrigued about the tower. By what process had Devils Tower been formed? Was it created by volcanic material, or was it an immense mass of igneous rock? Had it once been part of the bottom of an old sea? Who could solve this geological mystery? Roosevelt, collaborating with Lacey, inquired whether there wasn’t a clever way to save Devils Tower in the name of archaeology or paleontology. A concerted legal effort commenced in conservationist circles to devise a new presidential prerogative for preserving extraordinary wonders like Devils Tower from commercial destruction. Congressman Lacey, with his extensive knowledge of land law in the developing West, was a strong advocate of placing this “volcanic plug” in the public domain as a contribution to science.8 Decode the mysteries of Devils Tower, the thinking went, and geologists would finally understand how the Black Hills came into being.

Part of Roosevelt and Lacey’s concern in early 1906 was that “big oil” was an octopus with tentacles that harmed consumers and landscapes alike. That January, in fact, Missouri’s attorney general, Herbert Hadley, had initiated court hearings against Standard Oil Company of Indiana, Republic Oil Company, and Waters-Pierce Oil Company for “monopolistic conspiracy.” With Roosevelt cheering, John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, was hit with thirty-four subpoenas. For a while, Rockefeller hid from the law. By June 1906 the attorney general of Ohio got into the act, anxious to prosecute Standard Oil of New Jersey for violating Ohio’s antitrust laws. Recognizing that oil companies never were good stewards of the land, and worried that natural gas hunters would despoil the