Colonel Richard I. Dodge apparently had not heard these stories when he entered the Black Hills in 1875. In charge of a large military escort to a scientific team, he came in violation of Indian treaty rights after Custer’s 1874 expedition which had reported gold. Dodge noted that his questions to the Indians about this “terra incognita” known as the Black Hills were met with “studied silence.” This only heightened a true explorer’s curiosity. Perhaps the Indian scouts affected a calculated silence, hoping the whites would leave. When the great rock tower first loomed in sight, they told Dodge it was named, “with proper modification by our surveyors,” the Devils Tower. In later years few could recall why this name was used. If it was meant to scare off these white explorers and those to follow, it did not. The new wave of American settlers did not believe that natural objects held supernatural powers. No matter how awesome or unusual, science had an explanation for everything in nature, or would eventually. Devils Tower was determined to be the core of an ancient volcano, an obelisk of volcanic trachyte, with sides so straight that one “could only look upward in despair of ever planting his feet on the top,” as one geologist in Dodge’s expedition put it. The desire to conquer and tame nature, the view that men could use up natural things and discard them without asking the spirits, differed greatly from Indian concepts. While the tools and equipment of an advanced civilization could not be resisted, the explanation white men gave for their world could never satisfy the Indians. How uncomfortable it must have been for them when they were asked to relate their tribal stories of places such as Mateo Tepee, about which there could be no “proof!” One day a man would find a way to plant his feet on top of Devils Tower, and it would be hailed as a personal feat of strength and daring having nothing to do with the spirit of the bear that dwelt within his lodge. In the 20-year period after the opening of the Black Hills, cowmen and sheepherders discovered the hilly prairies and spacious grasslands that spread from the Belle Fourche River as far west as the Big Horn Mountains. Cattle trailed up from Texas flourished into great herds that freely roamed the open range. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad extended its line from Nebraska northwestward to Gillette, which quickly became the system’s largest shipping point. As many as 12,000 beef cattle and 40,000 head of sheep at a time waited at the railroad to be sent to eastern meatpackers. Wyoming became a state in 1890, its history already indelibly colored by the cowboy lifestyle and territorial range feuds.