BEAR LODGE. 201 



map of the region, and thougli more recently it is said to be known among 

 the Indians as "the bad god's tower," or, in better lOnglish, "the devil's 

 tower," the former name, well applied, is still retained. It stands on the 

 inmiediate western bank of the Belle Fourche, abont four miles southeast 

 from tlie Little ]\Iissouri Buttes. It was not reached by the Warren expe- 

 dition, but while the Raynolds expedition was in the vicinity of the Little 

 Missouri River two attempts, the last successful, were made by Mr. llutton 

 to reach it. He recorded, however, no particular description of it, so that 

 when we reached it in 1875 our examination had all the charm of novelty. 

 Its remarkable structure, its symmetry, and its prominence made it an 

 unfailing object of wonder. (See frontispiece ) It is a great rectangular 

 obelisk of trachyte, with a columnar structure, giving it a vertically striated 

 appearance, and it rises 625 feet, almost perpendicular, from its base. Its 

 summit is so entirely inaccessible that the energetic explorer, to whom the 

 ascent of an ordinarily difficult crag is but a pleasant pastime, standing 

 at its base could only look upward in despair of ever planting his feet on 

 the top. At a distance it resembles not a little the unfinished Washington 

 Monument in Washington City, with the difference, however, that Nature 

 has completed her work. 



Within a half mile of the banks of the Belle Fourche the shaft rises 

 with its broad base of debris from the plateau formed by the lower Jurassic 

 sandstone. Its dimensions were determined by Captain Tuttle, the astrono- 

 mer of the expedition_, who calculated them from measurements with the 

 sextant. The height of the summit above the river was found to be 1,126 

 feet, while approximately its elevation above the sea is 5,260 feet. The 

 width of the summit from north to south is 376 feet, and the width at base 

 is 796 feet. In an east and west direction the diameters are less. 



The rock is a coarsely porphyritic sanidin-trachyte of a greenish color, 

 closely resembling that of Terry Peak. In the mass it has a crystal-like 

 structure on a grand scale, which from a short distance gives the column 

 the appearance of a fascicle of gigantic fibers From the base, which is 

 considerably broader than the body of the peak, each fiber-like crystal or 

 colunm rises in a bold curve to the bottom of the vertical obelisk, which it 

 then follows to the summit. The columns have generally a rectangular or 



