The spring mud on the Belle Fourche River bottom smelled like iron and melt. It was March 1932. Crook County, Wyoming, had 5,000 people, no jobs to speak of, and one government employee who had just arrived in a borrowed truck with a broken heater. He carried a thermos. He carried a notebook. He had 1,152 acres of federal land to manage. And except for three wood-frame buildings, 867 feet of volcanic rock, and whatever cattle had wandered in from neighboring ranches, he had it entirely to himself.
His name was Newell Fodge Joyner. He was 26 years old. He was the second human being the United States government had ever assigned full-time to guard the country’s first national monument. And here is what the federal government gave him to work with: a Ford truck, a small salary, and a stone monolith that most Americans had never heard of.
That was the problem.
Devils Tower had been a national monument since 1906. Theodore Roosevelt signed the proclamation. The ink dried. Then, for the next 26 years, the federal government essentially ignored it. No staff. No roads to speak of. No bridge across the Belle Fourche River until 1928, which meant that for two decades, anyone trying to reach the Tower from the east had to ford the river, hope the water was low, and sometimes camp overnight on the wrong bank when it wasn’t. In the 1920s, an average of 9,100 people visited per year. Those numbers were going nowhere.
Then the Depression hit. And Newell Joyner showed up.
What nobody had counted on was what he would do with almost nothing.
Joyner had come from Yellowstone. He’d spent three years as a ranger-naturalist there, cataloging wildlife, learning what made people fall in love with a place. He arrived at Devils Tower with a scientist’s notebook and something closer to a carnival barker’s understanding of spectacle. The two things, it turned out, were not incompatible.
He started the logs immediately. Not just visitor counts. He documented every bird species. Every grazing violation. Every climber who showed up at the base of the Tower with rope and ambition. In 1937, a New York climber named Fritz Wiessner made the first technical ascent of the Tower. Joyner wrote it down. The next year, a Dartmouth medical student named Jack Durrance established a new route. Joyner wrote that down too, in enough detail that Durrance’s route is still the standard path today.
But Joyner understood something that the National Park Service did not yet fully grasp: that a monument nobody visits is just a very expensive piece of rock. So he put on a show.
He organized a rodeo at the base of the Tower. A cow-puncher’s track meet, held in the shadow of 600-foot columns of phonolite porphyry* while families drove in from 60 miles away. He formalized what locals had informally been doing for decades and turned it into the Northern Black Hills Pioneers’ Picnic, an annual gathering limited to people who had lived in the region for at least 35 years. Membership meant something. People came from across Wyoming and South Dakota. The park became a destination. His annual reports record hundreds attending, then more hundreds, then thousands.
He got the Tower into newsreels.
Then came the CCC.
The villain in this story is harder to name than a blizzard or a broken axle. It is indifference. The Depression-era federal government had 125 million people to worry about. Devils Tower, in the northeast corner of Wyoming, was not a priority. Funding was minimal. Infrastructure barely existed.
But Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps changed the math. Starting in 1933, young men from across the country arrived at work camps in national parks and monuments. Each man earned $30 a month. Each sent $25 of that home to a family that needed it. The CCC employed single men between 18 and 25 on conservation and development work. At Devils Tower, over a 17-month stretch, 338 men worked under Joyner’s watch. That was 7 percent of Crook County’s entire population, employed in a county where the unemployment rate had no bottom.
They built the visitor center that still stands. They built roads. They built the trails that 400,000 people walk every year. They built the infrastructure that turned a rock formation into a place you could actually go.
Joyner ran the operation. He also kept meticulous logs of every brand of cattle he found trespassing on monument land, catalogued in a 4×6 card index that is now archived at the University of Wyoming. He was not a man who wasted information.
Here is the strange detail that does not fit neatly anywhere: phonolite porphyry, the rock of Devils Tower, makes a ringing sound when struck. The name comes from the Greek for “sounding stone.” The Tower has been here for 50 million years. The columns are up to 20 feet wide and 600 feet tall. As the magma cooled underground, it contracted into hexagonal columns, though sometimes four-, five-, and seven-sided columns appeared. The rock is harder than the sedimentary stone that once buried it. The sediment eroded. The Tower did not.
Joyner understood that instinctively. He was harder than what surrounded him too.
By 1941, something happened that rewarded everything Joyner had built. A daredevil parachutist named George Hopkins, trying to win a $50 bet, landed on top of the Tower and could not get down. He was stranded for six days. Fog rolled in. Hopkins sent a note down saying he would try to parachute off. Joyner shut that down immediately. He coordinated the rescue operation himself, managed the press, brought in a Dartmouth climber named Jack Durrance whose route up the Tower he had documented three years earlier, and oversaw Hopkins’s safe descent.
The story went national. Every newspaper in the country covered it. Devils Tower was suddenly famous in a way that no promotional newsreel could manufacture.
Joyner served as custodian until 1947. Fifteen years. When he left, visitor numbers were climbing toward the tens of thousands annually. By 1954, the year after he left, Devils Tower hit an all-time high of 100,919 visitors. Today it draws 400,000 a year. There is a ridge named for him, a 1.5-mile loop trail with a bench at the top (of the ridge) where you can sit and watch the Tower stand.
He left behind scrapbooks. Diaries. Glass photographic slides. A brand catalog of every rancher in three states. A record of every bird, every visitor, every climber, every trespassing cow, every event he organized to keep the Tower alive in the imagination of the American West.
A monument to America’s first national monument. Maintained by one man. In a truck with a broken heater.
Trail Note: Devils Tower National Monument is located near Hulett, Wyoming, off U.S. Route 14. It is open year-round. The Tower Trail (1.3 miles) circles the base. The Joyner Ridge Trail (1.5 miles) offers distance views. Entry fee is $25 per vehicle. The visitor center that Joyner’s CCC crews built is still in use. nps.gov/deto
References
- Mattison, Ray H. “Devils Tower National Monument: The First Fifty Years.” National Park Service, 1955. nps.gov/deto
- “Newell Fodge Joyner Papers.” American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. archiveswest.orbiscascade.org
- “A Parachuter Once Got Stuck Five Days on Top of Devils Tower to Win a $50 Bet.” Cowboy State Daily, September 21, 2024. cowboystatedaily.com
- “How Was Devils Tower Formed?” Sciencing, March 24, 2022. sciencing.com
- “The Civilian Conservation Corps.” National Park Service. nps.gov/articles
A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified archival, institutional, and primary sources where available. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history. But it holds itself to the facts that matter.
Go deeper
The official park history of the Tower Joyner spent his life watching over.
* Some links below are affiliate links, meaning Ride Hike Roam may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
- Devils Tower: The Story Behind the Scenery by Stephen L. Norton. The official park history of the Tower Joyner spent his life watching over.
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