kotorielle

Thursday, Devils Tower turns 120. The Park Service is holding a 120th anniversary program at ten and another at one, under the name the monument has carried since 1906.

It was the first. On September 24, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed it the first national monument in the United States. The law he used, the Antiquities Act, was signed that June. It was written to stop people digging up and selling the ruins and pots of the Southwest. Roosevelt pointed it at a rock in northeast Wyoming instead.

The rock is the fixed thing. It is phonolite porphyry, and by the Park Service's own description the largest example of columnar jointing in the world: hundreds of tall, mostly six-sided columns that formed when the magma cooled and cracked. Eight hundred sixty-seven feet from base to summit. Twelve hundred sixty-seven above the Belle Fourche River. The summit is grass and cactus and a few chipmunks.

The name is not fixed.

The tribes who have lived around it call it Bear Lodge, or Bear's Tipi. In Lakota, Mato Tipila. More than twenty of them still hold it sacred. In 1875 an Army officer, Richard Dodge, came to the Black Hills and wrote in his journal: “The Indians call this shaft 'The Bad God's Tower,' a name adopted, with proper modifications, by our surveyors.” The Park Service now says Bear Lodge was the name in common use until Dodge arrived, and that a guide's mistranslation is the likely source of the one he wrote down.

In November 2014, Arvol Looking Horse, the Lakota spiritual leader, petitioned the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to restore Bear Lodge. The Oglala Sioux Tribe wrote to the Secretary of the Interior the next month. The requests have not been granted. The Park Service keeps a page called “Proposals to Change the Name,” and lists them there, one after another.

So the ground has one body and two names. It also has a third meaning stacked on top: in 1977 a movie made it the place where something from another world landed, and now people come to stand where the ship did.

For a month every June, the Park Service asks climbers to stay off it, so the tribes can hold ceremonies. The closure is voluntary. Climbing permits dropped about eighty-five percent. On the trail around the base there is a slow line of people looking up.

On Thursday the program will be about a hundred and twenty years of a monument. The Tower will not have moved. Only what we call it has, and who is still asking.