THIS SUMMER MARKS the hundredth anniversary of Devils Tower National Monument, a 60-million-year-old stump of intruded magma in the northeastern corner of Wyoming. (The nearest town is Hulett—feed store, lumber mill, bar, population 408.) Although it tops out at only 5,112 feet above sea level, Devils Tower rises 1,267 feet from the valley floor, like a lighthouse above an ocean of prairie. In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt, making quick use of the recently passed Antiquities Act—which gave the president power to grant national-monument status to areas possessing significant historical, scenic, or cultural value—proclaimed Devils Tower America's first such monument. These days it's one of the most identifiable natural landmarks in the country, with some 400,000 visitors a year, and an enduring symbol of the conflicting nuances of the sacred and the profane.

Its name alone is controversial. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Dodge called the butte "Bad God's Tower" in an 1875 geological survey; by the time Dodge returned east later that same year, it had become known as Devils Tower. Despite numerous protests, the name stuck. Various Native American tribes have their own names for the formation, although the most common is Mato Tipila, or "Bear Lodge."

To Native Americans, the Tower has been a holy place for millennia. What the Wailing Wall is to Jews, Mecca is to Muslims, and Lhasa's Drepung Loseling Monastery is to Tibetan Buddhists, Bear Lodge is to the northern Plains Indian tribes. According to anthropologists, Paleo-Indians, the ancestors of present-day Native Americans, were living in the Devils Tower region almost 10,000 years before the advent of Christianity.

"We look upon the land as female, a mother that nourishes us," explains Dr. Henrietta Mann, 72, special assistant to the president at Montana State University, in Bozeman. Mann is a Cheyenne and has a Ph.D. in American studies.

"We believe we come from the land, belong to the land, and that we are the caretakers of this land," says Mann. "For uncountable generations we went to Bear Lodge—we do not call it Devils Tower; even the use of that term is disrespectful for such a holy place—to pray, to seek guidance for the heart and spirit, and to maintain our sacred relationship to the land."

In the spring of 1868 at Fort Laramie, on behalf of the United States government, Civil War hero Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman and three other generals signed a 17-article treaty with more than 100 Sioux chiefs. The treaty ceded all of South Dakota west of the Missouri to the Sioux and designated those parts of Wyoming and Montana north of the Platte River and east of the Bighorn Mountains as Sioux hunting grounds that "no white person shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy" without Indian consent. Both the Black Hills and Devils Tower, the two most sacred places for the Sioux, became officially and permanently part of their homeland.

Six years later, in 1874, General George Custer led a large, illegal reconnaissance expedition into the Black Hills. It set off a gold rush, and the region was soon mobbed by miners and homesteaders. In 1876 Custer was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the U.S. government retaliated with ten years of genocide, methodically massacring or removing to reservations virtually all Native Americans.

"Even after we have lost everything, Bear Lodge is still there," says Mann, who participated in her last sun dance there in the nineties. "It is a powerful, sacred site, and we have a deep reverence for the place."