A trip to Devils Tower is also a trip to the Black Hills, an island of life rising out of the more arid Great Plains. Devils Tower sits on the Black Hills’ western fringe and is in fact the area’s most remarkable landmark. The Tower still evokes the mystery of this land where whites feared to travel until as late as 1876, the year General George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry fought—and were annihilated—in the battle of the Little Big Horn River in Montana. This last great victory of the Sioux and Cheyenne who refused reservation life made them hunted outlaws among whites. Their relatives on reservations soon gave away the tribal lands and with this went the Indians’ last hope of remaining free to travel and hunt from their revered Black Hills base. To speak of history in Wyoming is to speak of a mere hundred years. Events in the settlement are so recent that many residents can recite them as part of their family history. Before that are the oral histories of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Crow, and other tribes whose dates of occupation are but vaguely known. Gold discoveries in today’s South Dakota portion of the Black Hills forced the final clash with the plains tribes. Custer had confirmed gold reports and the pressure of the excited rush that followed broke the government’s earlier treaty resolve to preserve forever the Indians’ sovereignty over the Black Hills. Settlers carrying American civilization to the West by the overland route to California, Oregon Territory, and Mormon Utah then quickly flowed into this backwater area. As the frenzied furor over Black Hills gold diminished and mines and creeks played out, homesteaders settled on lands parceled out for ranches. Along the Belle Fourche River, where the plains Indian tribes had sometimes spent winters, a new era opened under this brooding tower of rock called Mateo Tepee. Place names in the West can be powerfully suggestive of history, but they can also be very unreliable; Devils Tower for instance. To the Indians this singular occurrence of dramatically upthrust rock marked the dwelling place of bears, hence Mateo Tepee or “Bear Lodge.” Their stories told of lost youngsters who were chased by a giant bear and climbed on top of a rock in a last desperate effort to save themselves. The children appealed to the spirits and the rock grew up out of the ground to lift the children out of the giant bear’s reach. Versions of this story belong to different tribes, but most have in common the bear’s futile attempt to claw its way to the top. This clawing left permanent grooves on the Tower.