Roosevelt names Devils Tower the nation's first national monument

For years, the rock that Lakota, Cheyenne, and Kiowa peoples knew as Matȟó Thípila, or Bear Lodge, had drawn ranchers and curious climbers to a remote corner of Crook County, Wyoming. On September 24, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed it Devils Tower National Monument, covering 1,347 acres around the tower and the Belle Fourche River below. It was the first time any president had used the newly signed Antiquities Act to protect a piece of American ground by proclamation alone. Congress had already set the land aside as a forest reserve in 1892; Roosevelt's signature made it the first monument protected this way, not by Congress but by presidential proclamation…