Devils Tower was an important landmark for Plains Indian tribes long before white settlers reached Wyoming, and the Sioux called it Mateo Tepee, or Grizzly Bear Lodge. Indian legends told of its origin, including one in which seven little girls, chased onto a low rock by attacking bears, were lifted upward to safety as the bears' claws scored furrowed columns into the rising sides, and the girls ultimately reached the sky and became the constellation Pleiades. Although fur trappers may have visited, they left no written evidence, and the first documented visitors were several members of Captain W.F. Raynold's Yellowstone Expedition in 1859. Sixteen years later Colonel Richard Dodge led a U.S. Geological Survey party to the massive rock formation and coined the name Devils Tower. Congress designated the area a U.S. forest reserve in 1892, and in 1906 Devils Tower became the nation's first national monument. Rising 1,280 feet above the Belle Fourche River, it later became a center for rock climbing: local rancher William Rogers made the first recorded climb on July 4, 1893, using a ladder of wooden pegs driven into cracks in the rock face, and technical climbing techniques were first used to reach the summit in 1937 when Fritz Wiessner and a small party from the American Alpine Club succeeded. Today hundreds of climbers scale its sheer rock walls each summer and must register with a park ranger before and after attempting a climb.