Devils Tower National Monument

Devils Tower is an igneous butte in northeastern Wyoming, sacred to the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and other Plains peoples, who know it by names including Bear Lodge and connect it to origin stories about its distinctive fluted columns. President Theodore Roosevelt designated it the first national monument in the United States in 1906, a decision that formalized federal oversight of a landscape already shaped by cattle ranching along the Belle Fourche River corridor. The river remains central to local agriculture and supports wildlife across the surrounding mixed-grass prairie and ponderosa pine forest. The KOA campground on the monument’s edge offers teepee-style accommodations, a commercial adaptation that sits at an uneasy distance from the formation’s Indigenous significance.