Devils Tower Lakota Indian Mato Tipila
Devils Tower Lakota Indian Mato Tipila, which means “Bear Tower”. Many of the Plains Indians tribes consider Devils Tower a sacred place known as Bear's Lodge or Bear's Tipi. One of the legends from the Kiowa tradition tells of seven little girls who were chased by a bear. As the girls leapt onto a small rock, it began to grow toward the sky. The bear tried to catch the girls, but it fell short, its claw marks scratching the tower. The girls became the stars of the Black Hills sky - the Big Dipper or the Pleiades.
The name we know today originated in 1875 during an expedition led by Col. Richard Irving Dodge when his interpreter Old School Bear Claw misinterpreted the name to mean Bad God's Tower. This was later shortened to the Devil's Tower which is a monolithic igneous intrusion or volcanic neck (Old School Indian-Big Big Rock) located in the Black Hills near Hulett and Sundance Wyoming. It is 1,267 feet high, the summit is 5,112 feet above sea level.
Devils Tower was the first declared United States National Monument, established on September 24, 1906, by President Theodore Roosevelt.
