Bear Butte is a 4,422-foot-high volcanic bubble rising 1,200 feet above the plains, serving for centuries as a guide to Indians, fur traders, soldiers, cowboys, and travelers. It was visited or passed by Verendrye in 1743; Lt. G. K. Warren in 1855; Hayden, the scientist, and Reynolds in 1859; Custer in 1874; and later by many geological scientists. It was a sacred mountain to the Cheyenne, the first Indians known to white men to live adjacent to it, and here their spiritual leader Sweet Medicine received four sacred Cheyenne arrows and a code of ethics many centuries ago. Prayers were offered on its rugged slopes, and smoke signals from its lofty summit alerted watchful eyes to travelers on the Bismarck-Deadwood Trail to the north and other sojourners within view. Near here in 1857, a great council of Indians resolved to keep the Black Hills inviolate from white men, and for two decades this policy guided their defensive actions. Custer's annihilation at the Little Big Horn in 1876 and the establishment of Camp Sturgis on its northwest slope on July 1, 1878 marked the passing of the red man and the buffalo. Today Bear Butte stands as an outpost of the Hills, still a shrine to the Cheyenne who come here to worship and a monument to human history and nature's strange handiwork.