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.
Cowboy songs and stories of Western American folklore often mentioned the Belle Fourche River. The first ranchers to settle along it established small-scale cattle outfits centered about Hulett within sight of Devils Tower. These early-day settlers may not have revered the Tower as the Indians did, but neither were they disposed to see it exploited for private gain. There was enough feeling to cause Wyoming’s Senator Francis E. Warren to introduce into the U.S. Senate in July of 1892 a bill to establish Devils Tower National Park. Congressional support for the bill fizzled, but the General Land Office in Washington had already withdrawn from settlement several sections of land adjoining the Tower and the Little Missouri Buttes to the northwest. Protection of Devils Tower was at least temporarily assured.
The same year the park bill failed, two men now famous in the history of the West traveled to Devils Tower hoping against hope like any other tourists that it would match their own expectations. Photographer William H. Jackson had been commissioned by the State of Wyoming to photograph the State’s scenic attractions for the World’s Columbian Exposition the next year in Chicago. With him traveled a friend, the landscape painter Thomas Moran. Their round trip from the railhead at Gillette, by horse-drawn wagon lasted four days. Moran described the adventure in a magazine article illustrated by his drawings, and a Jackson photo of the Tower ended up in Chicago. In their one afternoon there, they had produced the first widely known visual records of Devils Tower.
Jackson and Moran’s unceremonious visit to the Tower in 1892 was undoubtedly forgotten in the rush of excitement the next year. Homesteaders, ranchers, and cowhands and their families flocked in unusual numbers to celebrate Independence Day at Devils Tower. Handbills called the Tower one of the greatest natural wonders in the United States and announced that “the rarest sight of a lifetime” would be observed at the festivities. The news obviously spread far, for more than 1,000 people made the trip.
The ballyhoo surrounded William Rogers. A local cowboy, he became, as far as anybody knew, the first human being to set foot on top of the Tower. He and a climbing partner, Willard Ripley, made the ascent by way of a wooden ladder they had worked on all that spring for the first 107 meters (350 feet) of the Tower. Those who knew the tall and raw-boned Rogers said he was never afraid of man or devil. After ceremonies on the ground, he and Ripley scrambled over the boulder field and started up the ladder with the cheers of the crowd presumably ringing in their ears. The climb took only an hour, the riskiest part of the business having been accomplished in the days preceding the event.
While the Tower draws our eyes upward, playful prairie dogs invite us to look downward—to their burrows on the level grassland between the Tower and the Belle Fourche River.
These communal animals are forever on the alert against such predators as the screech owl.
