At the turn of the century, the Tower became a natural meeting place for people who might see each other but once a summer at a Fourth of July celebration. Oldtimers recall that a small, rough-cut wooden platform served as a dance floor; the merry-go-round had seats for four children at most; and the home-grown orator read the Declaration of Independence. The affairs were fun and lasted for days. People camped at the Tower, and sometimes those who came across the river from the east were stranded by a quick summer flood. In time, the harshness of the frontier softened a bit. Towns and cities replaced crude settlements and provided secure bases from which to look out at the wonders of the land. The newly arrived settlers made the West their own. And, to compress time and events into a few words, some people began to think about protecting some of the uniqueness of the West. The National Park System owes its existence to this dawning of a conservation ethic in the late 19th century. Yellowstone, in northwestern Wyoming, became the first national park in 1872. A few other tracts were set aside as parks in subsequent years, but the preservation movement surged in 1906, when Congress passed the Antiquities Act. The President now had the authority to create national monuments. Not only scenery was to remain unspoiled in these monuments, but also priceless Indian ruins, pottery, and projectiles and other objects of antiquity were to be protected from looting collectors. President Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a national goal and used the Antiquities Act to proclaim the first eighteen national monuments. Devils Tower National Monument became the first, created on September 24, 1906, giving Wyoming both the first national park and the first national monument. [Illustration: _Light and shadows constantly play upon the Tower’s splintered, many-sided columns._] The next campaign was for money to build a bridge over the Belle Fourche River. By 1916, when the local families gathered at the Tower for another July Fourth picnic, it seemed that Congress would never appropriate money to turn the place into a proper public resort. A petition to Wyoming’s Congressman Frank W. Mondell complaining about washed out trails and difficult access to the Tower was circulated among the 1916 picnickers and may have done some good. The next year, the newly created National Park Service directed the building of an entrance road, soon to be improved again for auto traffic. By the end of the 1920s Wyoming’s participation in the national enthusiasm for highway construction was showing results. Old pathways followed by the Sioux, later broadened for buckboard wagon and stagecoach, were now graded and oiled for motorcars. A trip to the West was no longer an expedition of months: cross-country motoring had arrived. [Illustration: _An aerial view discloses the tear-drop shape of the top and the extent of the Great Plains around the Tower._]