The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary desert.” It is within this changing ecological and cultural landscape that the name for the Tower changed from Bear Lodge to Devils Tower. Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota, later said: 'A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell-a death-wind for my people.”Ĭolonel Richard Irving Dodge, who would be the first to ascribe the name 'Devils Tower' to the now-famous butte, proclaimed in 1867 that 'every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” He later described the condition of the Great Plains: “Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses.

The loss of bison was a major reason Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala Lakota leader, finally surrendered in 1878 without food and clothing for his people, he knew he could not keep them safe. Although there was no official government extermination program, only a few hundred bison remained by the 1880s. Bison hides fetched a premium for many years, and railroads and telegraphs had no tolerance for animals that destroyed their equipment. Non-government interests also drove the slaughter of North America's largest animal. Columbus Delano, President Grant’s Interior Secretary, wrote in 1872 that “the rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs.” Bison represented the infrastructure of Plains Indians, and any good military leader knew that destroying an enemy's infrastructure would cripple their efforts at resistance. Since Plains Indian cultural life depended so heavily upon bison (commonly called buffalo), many officials understood that destroying the latter would likewise destroy the former. The US government determined there were two solutions to this problem: assimilate Native Americans into white culture, or remove them entirely. Native Americans saw areas like the Great Plains and Black Hills as a resource to sustain their culture, while European Americans saw resources to be exploited for capital gain. The two cultures viewed the landscape with irreconcilable differences. Indigenous people were seen by many white Americans as a problem. People who depended on these animals for thousands of years had lost their primary source of food and shelter. By 1880 there were only a few hundred left. In 1850, American bison numbered in the tens of millions.

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