1. INTRODUCTION Devils Tower is located in a bend of the Belle Fourche River in the northeastern corner of Wyoming. The National Monument, which occupies 1,347 acres, is situated in a transitional environment between the rolling plains of the Powder River Basin to the west and the forested slopes of the Black Hills to the east. The Tower was the first National Monument in the United States. It was designated by President Theodore Roosevelt on September 24, 1906, under the provisions of the Antiquities Act (16 USC 431-433), which was enacted in June of the same year. The Tower, which rises approximately 1,200 feet above the Belle Fourche River floodplain, is composed of phonolite porphyry, characterized by large feldspar crystals embedded in a matrix of smaller crystals. This mineralogy tends to form the monolithic columns for which the Tower is so well known. The geological origin of Devils Tower has been variously interpreted. The earliest theory was that Devils Tower was the throat of a volcano. More recently, geologists have suggested that the Tower is the uneroded remains of a laccolith, which is a lens-shaped igneous rock intrusion that causes a dome-shaped uplift. Another hypothesis is that Devils Tower is a plutonic plug, another variety of igneous intrusion, that failed to reach the surface. Current research supports the latter two interpretations, and also suggests that the geological events that produced Devils Tower began about 60 million years ago. The National Park Service is responsible for managing all national monuments. Cultural resources – which include historic sites, prehistoric sites, and Native American ethnographic landscapes – are managed in compliance with a host of federal laws, including the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Archaeological Resource Protection Act, the 1999 presidential memorandum entitled Government-to-Government Relations with Native American Tribal Governments, Executive Order 13175 entitled Consultation and Coordination with Indian Tribal Governments, and Executive Order 13007 entitled Indian Sacred Sites. To address their statutory and regulatory responsibilities to identify, assess, manage, and protect cultural resources, the Park Service funded a Native American ethnographic survey in 1991. During the survey, University of Texas (Arlington) anthropologists systematically interviewed traditional practitioners representing six American Indian tribes. The resulting report, Ethnographic Overview and Assessment of Devils Tower National Monument (Hanson and Chirinos 1997), provided a narrative summary of tribal ethnohistory and the interview transcriptions. The Archaeology Laboratory of the University of South Dakota conducted a field survey and National Register evaluation of all historic and prehistoric cultural resources at Devils Tower in 1997 and 1998 (Molyneaux et al. 2000). Park Service personnel assembled historic documentation for Devils Tower, which resulted in a National Register of Historic Places listing in July 2000. This listing deals specifically with historic period features. A place- name study was conducted in 2001 (Spence 2002). Taken together, these interrelated studies resulted in documentation that traced the prehistory, history, and contemporary use of Devils Tower by Native Americans, as well as the Euroamerican history of the area. Over the past 15 years, the National Park Service has consulted with representatives from 23 Indian tribes concerning the management of Devils Tower. The current study is intended to supplement the original 1997 ethnographic survey report by expanding the scope of investigations to include all 23 tribes. The project has been divided into two phases. Phase I is intended to identify possible tribal affiliations to Devils Tower by means of a review of the professional literature. This report addresses Phase I requirements. It includes 1) a general examination of regional Indian treaties and the establishment of territorial boundaries beginning in the first half of the 19th century, and 2) narrative ethnohistoric and ethnological overviews drawn from the archaeological and anthropological literature, with special attention to documentation that links individual tribes to the Devils Tower study area. Phase II will involve field interviews with tribal representatives, conducted in order to learn more about the cultural significance of Devils Tower to regional Indian tribes. The Park Service will use this information to manage cultural resources within the monument in a way that is sensitive to Native American perspectives, and responsive to the legal mandates (listed in the first paragraph) with which the Park Service must comply. Phase II will endeavor to document Native American connections to Devils Tower through tribal oral traditions, so that the Park Service can manage the collective cultural resources not only from the standpoint of regulatory requirements, but also from the perspective of native traditional practitioners whose oral traditions can be traced back hundreds of years. We would like to offer the following summary of the Phase I literature review. Although in many cases the professional literature does not mention particular tribes or bands in association with the Tower, there is ample documentary evidence that the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Eastern Shoshone, and Teton Sioux were resident to the study area at different times over the past 400 years and were likely familiar with Devils Tower. However, it is also possible that the Comanche, who ranged widely throughout the Plains region, and who are known to have camped in south-central and southeastern Wyoming in the early 19th century, were also familiar with Devils Tower. The archaeological record suggests that the Crow briefly expanded into the northern and central Powder River Basin during the late 17th century, and they may have encountered Devils Tower at that time. Although northeastern Nebraska is generally regarded as the historic homeland of the Ponca, the tribe resided briefly in the Black Hills (Swanton 1952:291, Howard 1965:15, also see Dorsey 1884) and ventured deep into the Rocky Mountains in order to hunt bison (Howard 1965:18). The Plains Apache, known principally in the archaeological record as the Dismal River Apache, occupied the eastern border of Wyoming during the early 1700s (Gunnerson 1968). Blackfeet oral traditions include mention of the “Seventh Paint,” a variety of micaceous red ocher unique to the Sunrise Mine area of east-central Wyoming (Murray 2005). These are more than anomalous and tantalizing archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic details. They show that the professional literature is likely deficient with regard to the true story of Native American connections to Devils Tower, a story that the Park Service hopes to elaborate in the course of this study and with the assistance of tribal consultants. References Cited Dorsey, James O. 1884 Omaha Sociology. 3rd Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Pp. 205-370. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Gunnerson, James H. 1968 Plains Apache Archeology: A Review. Plains Anthropologist 13:167- 189. Hanson, Jeffrey R., and Sally Chirinos 1997 Ethnographic Overview and Assessment of Devils Tower National Monument. Denver: U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. Howard, James H. 1965 The Ponca Tribe. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 195. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. Molyneaux, Brian L., Nancy J. Hodgson, and Rachel M. Hinton 2000 The Archaeological Survey and National Register Evaluation of Devils Tower National Monument, Crook County, Wyoming: 1997-1998. Report on file at Devils Tower National Monument, Wyoming. Murray, John 2005 Personal communication to Fred Chapman. Wyoming Army National Guard Native American Consultation Meeting, March 2005, Cheyenne, WY. Spence, Mark 2002 Brief Naming Report for Devils Tower National Monument. Report on file at Devils Tower National Monument, Wyoming. Swanton, John R. 1952 The Indian Tribes of North America. Bulletin 145, Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: Government Printing Office. 2. FEDERAL LAWS AND TREATIES Three important episodes of treaties between the United States government and American Indian tribes relate to the northern and northwestern Plains. These occurred in the years 1825, 1851, and 1868. The treaties of 1825 were mainly intended to create peace among the tribes in the study area, and to establish formal relationships between the federal government and the resident tribes. The 1851 and 1868 treaties tended to reiterate prescriptively the practice of peaceful relations, but also assigned specific territories to the tribes in ways that were intended to encourage Indian people to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle, in which agricultural initiatives and enterprise were emphasized. In 1825, a number of treaties were negotiated with various tribes on the High Plains, although none dealt explicitly with the Devils Tower area. These treaties did not establish territorial boundaries for the tribes, but rather loosely articulated the government’s expectations of peaceful interaction with and between Indian tribes in the region. For the next 25 years, no significant treaties were negotiated with tribes in the western United States. In 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed by federal officials and a host of