Mato Tipila

by Richard Seifried

Signal Hill Musings

March, 2007                                                                                                        

February weather continues as I write this.  This year February has been cold.  Ice.  Flurries.  Rain.  For two days, Signal Hill sat within a low, heavy, gray cloud of cheerlessness.

One night I got up and as I walked to my office, I looked into Jean’s office and saw Mato Tipila.  The splendid tower was a screensaver on my computer too.  I smiled.  What a wonder it is!

We whites call it Devils Tower.  I thought about that and for the first time realized that I didn’t like the name.  The devil had nothing to do with the beauty of the 1,267-foot high formation that rises so exquisitely above the Belle Fourche River. 

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Mato Tipila is its real name.  Bear’s lodge, in English.

Never have I passed through eastern Wyoming without taking the side trip to pay homage to Mato Tipila.  I’ve hiked around the base, perhaps a mile, and once I hiked the much wider circular trail beginning at the park’s entrance station, climbing up the eastern slopes of red sandstone and siltstone which rise from the Belle Forche streambed.

It was on the latter hike that I learned that deer bark.  I heard the peculiar sound and even saw their mouths open when they called out the single, rasping cry.

Rattlesnakes live among the debris of the fallen columns at the tower’s base.  They avoid people and are seldom seen.  Porcupines and grouse dwell amid the sparse, small pines and out on the magnificent grassy meadows that adorn the surrounding hills.  Coyotes, black bear, and wildcats live there too.

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Mato Tipila is a sacred place.  One doesn’t need to be told that.  The feeling is in the air, a quiet excitement surely emanating from something holy.

Because of my age, I will never get to do what I have wanted to do for decades.  As whites typically do, I always had to push on, find a motel, get to Sheridan or Rapid City.  Move on down the road.  Once, we camped overnight but it was in the national park campground.

What I have wanted to do is to stay there, where the picture above was taken, amid the medicine bundles of our Native people.  I want to sit all day long, looking at Mato Tipila.  Feel the spiritual energy that exists there.  Watch the sun sail across the heavens.  Feel the hot dryness of its summer rays.  Perhaps watch a thunderstorm form and sweep down upon me.  At night, I could listen to strange sounds, sense the overhead passage of bats and other nocturnal winged creatures.  Wonder at the magnificence of the Milky Way.  Hear animals moving about in the grass and wonder what they are.  Feel.  Sense.  Smell.

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What else would I experience?  That great stone monolith rising into the night sky.  What would it give to me?  Would I sense and feel, not imagine, the spirits of the ancient ones who paid tribute to their God?  At the very same place where I would be sitting or lying? 

Their descendants still visit Mato Tipila.  Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Shoshone, Crow, Arapaho, and others make pilgrimages to the tower.  They leave offerings, say their prayers to Wakan Tanka, the Creator.  

I would like to give thanks for such a wonder, such an enrichment to my life that is so confused with modern technology.

And why shouldn’t I?  My God made Mato Tipila, you know. 

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