Something About Wyoming's Devils Tower Stopped Making Sense in 1875

Two gaps in the record of one rock in Wyoming. The first is a hundred and fifty years old. In 1876 a cavalry officer wrote one sentence about what the Indians called this place, and never said who told him or in what language. The second is twenty years old. In 2006 the Geological Survey found a fresh split in the stone under a leaning column on the most popular climbing route. They painted the contact so further breakage would show. Nobody has published what it showed. I never worked that monument. What I did for thirty-two seasons was write reports about things I could not explain, and read other men's. NINE THINGS YOU HAVE PROBABLY BEEN TOLD, AND WHAT THE RECORD SAYS 1. The columns are mostly hexagonal. The man who mapped the tower for the Geological Survey wrote that most are five sided, some four and six. No survey of that rock has reported a seven sided column. The seven comes off a general page about columnar jointing worldwide. 2. The tower is 40.5 million years old. That figure was published in 1961 and has been replaced. Modern argon dating puts it near 49 million. The old one is still on the Park Service page, in the encyclopedia entry and the heritage listing, all citing the 1961 paper. Not a conspiracy. Citation inertia. 3. The laccolith theory fails because the ground around the tower lies flat. It does not lie flat. The 1956 survey measured the beds tilting inward three to five degrees within half a mile of the base, and a later team measured that same tilt independently. The real objection is quieter: no roof rock heavy enough to make the blister. 4. The Park Service settled on the stock theory. Its own geology atlas runs through every hypothesis and ends on one line: apparent discrepancies still exist for all of the origin hypotheses. Four explanations are still standing. 5. The name came from mishearing two similar Lakota words. That claim sits on a Park Service web page that quotes no linguist, cites no dictionary, and says the resemblance suggests a mistranslation. The study the Park Service commissioned in 1998 argues otherwise: that Dodge received the phrase already in English, from his interpreter. 6. The missing apostrophe was a presidential typo. The Board on Geographic Names has a written policy discouraging possessive apostrophes in place names, with about five exceptions ever granted. Dodge himself wrote it with an apostrophe in 1876. It was taken out later, by rule. 7. A federal body voted in 2024 to rename it Bear Lodge. An advisory committee recommended it. It is not the Board on Geographic Names and has no naming authority. The 2014 petition has never been taken up: the Board will not rule while Congress is considering the matter, and bills have arrived across six consecutive Congresses. 8. The courts upheld the June closure as an accommodation of religion. The district court did. The appeals court never reached the religion question and said so: it dismissed on standing, because every named plaintiff was still climbing in June. The one mandatory piece of the plan, a ban on commercial guiding, was blocked in 1996 and withdrawn. 9. Geologists cannot agree because geologists argue. The working answer is that there is very little data from the tower itself. Almost no sampling has ever been allowed, because it was the first national monument in this country and more than twenty Plains nations hold it sacred. The protection that saved this rock is the same protection keeping it from being explained. STILL OPEN No public statement from the sponsors of two of the blocking bills. The tribal president who wrote to the Interior Secretary in 2014 is unnamed in the federal record. The text of the 2014 petition is not public. Interior has never publicly answered its own advisory committee. And on the first pitch of the Durrance route there is a coat of paint, twenty years old, that nobody has published a word about. Every case on this channel starts with a record somebody kept when there was no reason to keep it.