Jan Conn and Joan Showacre were members of the first all-woman party to climb the Tower, in 1952. Fritz Wiessner in 1937 and Jack Durrance in 1938 pioneered two of the first technical climbing routes. In 1948 Jan Conn climbed to the top with her husband, Herb.
When they reached the top, Rogers and Ripley strung up Old Glory from a flagpole they had somehow already managed to carry to the top! It was a spectacle in which many in the crowd below could claim a part. Muslin for the oversized flag apparently was purchased in Sundance, Wyoming, where it was painted and sewn together by a committee of boosters. Someone, it is said, had tailored a patriotic climbing suit of red, white, and blue that was presented to Rogers at ceremonies before the climb.
Ranchers who witnessed the event said that while Rogers may indeed have risked his neck on the Tower, he reaped an entrepreneurial bonanza afterwards. During the daylong merriment and the dancing that evening, his wife and his partner’s wife ran the only refreshment stand. The flag, which had blown down, was cut up and sold for souvenirs, and the ladies made a small fortune. Perhaps the boast of the handbill published that year by the Crook County Commissioners was true: It was possible to have a better time at Devils Tower that summer than in Chicago at the World’s Fair.
Rogers and Ripley raised a public spectacle perhaps not equalled until the caper of “Devils Tower George” Hopkins, the subject of a 1941 Tower-top rescue mission by alpinist Jack Durrance. Hopkins parachuted to the top and was stranded, keeping millions of newspaper readers in suspense over his fate atop the isolated rock monument few had ever seen. Durrance rescued his man five days later. Devils Tower again loomed in the national imagination, with the screening of the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” And in 1979 a televised sports show featured George Willig, the “human fly,” whose climbing antics were beamed nationwide via space satellite. As we entered the decade of the 1980s the number of registered climbs of Devils Tower surpassed the 10,000 mark. But that’s jumping ahead too quickly in the chronology of this story.
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.
Light and shadows constantly play upon the Tower’s splintered, many-sided columns.