Devils Tower was the first site protected under a law written for exactly this kind of place, and its origin stories are as varied as the tribes who tell them.
The first national monument
President Theodore Roosevelt designated the tower the first US National Monument in 1906, using the newly passed Antiquities Act, a law drafted mainly to protect archaeological and natural sites from looting and unregulated development. The designation predates most of the surrounding legal framework for protecting sacred Native sites, and its use here set a template followed for over a century of subsequent monument designations.
A shared claw-mark story, told differently
Multiple tribes, including the Kiowa, Lakota and Cheyenne, hold origin stories describing the tower's vertical grooves as claw marks left by a giant bear pursuing people, often children, who were lifted to safety atop a rock that then grew upward beyond the bear's reach. The core image recurs across these traditions while names, details and surrounding narrative differ by nation, reflecting shared regional experience of the landform rather than a single original story borrowed by the others.
How the rock itself formed
Geologists generally treat the tower as an igneous intrusion, magma that pushed into surrounding sedimentary rock and cooled underground before erosion stripped away the softer rock around it, leaving the harder columnar formation standing exposed; the precise depth and process of formation remains an active subject of geological study rather than fully settled.