120 Years Ago Today, America's First National Monument Was a Rock, Not a Ruin

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Sept. 24, 2026 (Thu.)

TravelSept. 24, 2026

120 Years Ago Today, America's First National Monument Was a Rock, Not a Ruin

The law was written to stop looters. It had no word for nature, only a line for everything else.

In Three Lines

On Sept. 24, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt made a lone rock in Wyoming the country's first national monument.
The law he used was meant to protect ancient ruins, and Congress passed it on a promise that very little land would be locked up.
Roosevelt didn't break that law. He used a phrase Congress had left in it.

Say "national monument" and most people picture something built: the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, a cliff dwelling in the Southwest. That's a fair guess. Most of the things we call monuments were made by human hands.

The first one wasn't. On Sept. 24, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt set aside a column of rock rising out of the prairie in northeastern Wyoming. Moviegoers know it as the place the mothership lands in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The National Park Service calls it the largest example of columnar jointing in the world. Its name is Devils Tower.

Devils Tower. Each vertical groove marks a separate rock column. Photo: U.S. National Park Service, 2008 · Public domain ↗

Northeastern Wyoming. It became America’s first national monument on Sept. 24, 1906. Boundaries: U.S. Census Bureau

Roosevelt did it with a law that had been on the books for a little over three months. That law was written to stop people from digging up ancient pottery. It said nothing about rocks, mountains or canyons. The tower got in through a single phrase near the end.

A law against looters

By the late 1800s, collectors were taking pottery and other artifacts from cliff dwellings across the Southwest, left by Native peoples centuries earlier. Much of it went into private hands. Some went to the country's biggest museums.

In 1900, three bills to stop the losses landed in the House. The broadest would have let the president protect not just ruins but "any natural formation of scientific or scenic value or interest, or natural wonder or curiosity" on public land. Another capped each protected ruin at 320 acres.

The Interior Department preferred the broad version. It wanted power to create parks for their scenery and natural wonders. Rep. John Lacey of Iowa, who chaired the House Public Lands Committee, resisted. That was reasonable. If the goal was to stop looting, keeping the bill about ruins made sense.

Some members had a different worry: Western land being taken off the market. During House debate on June 5, 1906, Rep. John Stephens of Texas asked how much land the bill would pull out of reach. "Not very much," Lacey answered.

He pointed to the text. Every monument had to be "confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management" of whatever it protected. The House report described small reservations that would hold only what was needed to preserve "relics of prehistoric times." That was a promise most members could live with. Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act on June 8.

What came out, and what stayed in

Over several years of bargaining, Congress stripped out the power to create parks. The phrase "natural wonder" never made it into the final text. One line from the broader Interior draft survived.

Section 2 let the president declare as national monuments "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest."

Think of it as the last box on a form. The list names landmarks and structures, then leaves a line marked "Other" in case something doesn't fit. A blank like that doesn't decide what goes in it. Whoever holds the pen does.

One official wanted the law to reach further. William A. Richards ran the General Land Office, the Interior Department agency that managed the federal government's land. He was a surveyor by trade and had served as governor of Wyoming from 1895 to 1899.

According to a National Park Service history of the act, Richards wanted "natural wonder" written into the law. He didn't get it. But the same history concludes that the catch-all line in Section 2 filled the gap in practice.

Sept. 24, 1906

Wyoming had tried to protect the tower before. In early 1892, Sen. Francis E. Warren asked the Land Office to shield it from private claims. Soon after, the office set aside about 60 square miles as a temporary forest reserve, then cut it to 18.75 square miles in June.

On July 1, Warren introduced a bill to create a "Devils Tower National Park." It was referred to committee, and Congress never acted on it.

The tower was already an attraction. On July 4, 1893, two local ranchers, William Rogers and Willard Ripley, climbed most of the way on a ladder of wooden pegs they had spent months driving into a crack. They advertised the ascent as the "rarest sight of a lifetime." Around 1,000 people came, some from more than 100 miles away.

What Congress wouldn't do in 14 years, Roosevelt did with one proclamation. It described the tower this way:

"such an extraordinary example of the effect of erosion in the higher mountains as to be a natural wonder and an object of historic and great scientific interest"

That was the first entry in the "Other" box. A Park Service history of the act notes that despite the nod to history, this was essentially a scientific monument.

The reservation covered 1,152.91 acres, about 1.8 square miles. Historian Ray Mattison's account for the Park Service says the Land Office commissioner recommended that size as enough for proper care. The map attached to the proclamation, printed in the federal Statutes at Large, carries Richards' name.

Whether Roosevelt ever saw the tower is unknown. The Park Service says no evidence shows that he visited.

Ruins 75 days later, a canyon two years later

The ruins the law was written for had to wait. Roosevelt proclaimed the first historic monuments on Dec. 8, 1906. They were El Morro in New Mexico, a bluff where Spanish travelers carved their names, and Montezuma Castle in Arizona, a prehistoric dwelling built into a cliff. The same day, he added Petrified Forest.

Montezuma Castle, Arizona. This cliff dwelling was among the first historic monuments, proclaimed on Dec. 8, 1906. Photo: U.S. National Park Service, 2003 · Public domain ↗

75 days

From the first national monument, a rock, to the first historic one, a ruin

Up to this point, you could argue Lacey's promise held. According to the Park Service history, the monuments proclaimed before the Grand Canyon averaged about 3,300 acres.

Then, on Jan. 11, 1908, Roosevelt proclaimed Grand Canyon National Monument. It covered more than 800,000 acres, roughly 700 times the size of Devils Tower. The stated reason was again scientific interest: the proclamation called it the greatest eroded canyon in the United States.

Ralph Cameron held mining claims inside the canyon and refused to leave. When the government sued to remove him, he argued the president had no authority to make a monument out of it. Given Lacey's "not very much," he had a point on paper. In 1920, the Supreme Court rejected that argument and held that the Grand Canyon was an object of scientific interest under the law.

The people running the program saw it too. In his 1908 annual report, Land Office Commissioner Fred Dennett wrote that the act's wording fixed "practically no limits" on what could be reserved.

The numbers show how far the "Other" box grew. From 1906 to 1970, presidents proclaimed 36 historic monuments and 51 scientific ones. By 1970, the historic ones held about 155,000 acres. The scientific ones, counting those later turned into national parks, held more than 11.8 million. The "Other" box had grown to roughly 76 times the size of the list above it. Grand Canyon, Zion and Olympic national parks all started this way.

Standing at the base today

From the trail that circles it, the tower rises 867 feet. Measured from the Belle Fourche River below, it stands 1,267 feet. Geologists agree it began as magma that cooled underground and was exposed as softer rock around it eroded. They still disagree on exactly how that magma cooled.

As of September 2021, the Park Service counted more than 509,000 visitors in a year, a record. About 5,000 people climb the tower each year. Visits jumped after Steven Spielberg used it in 1977. A park ranger told CNN this year that attendance rose more than 76 percent, from about 153,000 to over 270,000.

The name is still disputed. Most maps in the late 1800s labeled it Bear Lodge, from the Lakota name Mato Tipila. In 1875, Col. Richard Irving Dodge, who commanded the Army escort for a survey party, wrote that local tribes called it "Bad God's Tower," and the name Devils Tower grew from that account.

The Park Service says no other record ties the site to bad gods or evil spirits. Some think Dodge's party garbled the words for bear and bad god. Others think he renamed it on purpose. The agency says the truth is lost to history, and its news releases now read "Mato Tipila – Bear Lodge (Devils Tower)."

In 1887 photographer John Grabill titled this picture “Devil’s Tower or Bear Lodge.” Photo: J.C.H. Grabill, 1887 · Library of Congress · Public domain ↗

More than 20 tribes regard the tower as sacred, and June is a month of ceremonies. A 1995 climbing plan asks climbers to stay off voluntarily for all of June, and the closure has run every year since 1996. It isn't enforced. June climbing has still dropped by an average of 85 percent.

The tower became a monument because of one line written in 1906. That year, Congress struck "natural wonder" from the law and kept the box marked "Other." Roosevelt wrote a rock in it first, then a canyon. Congress drew the box. The people holding the pen decided how big it got.

Sources

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Daily Woody

America's First National Monument Was a Rock, Not a Ruin

120 Years Ago Today, America's First National Monument Was a Rock, Not a Ruin

A law against looters

What came out, and what stayed in

Sept. 24, 1906

Ruins 75 days later, a canyon two years later

Standing at the base today

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