The OddWay News
Case Study No. 19 · · 3 Min Read
Thirty-seven places in this index are named after the Devil, across twenty-two states. Line them up and the pattern is not folklore — it is a survey of every piece of ground that could not be farmed, crossed, or explained.
Set them out in a list and something becomes obvious that you would never notice one at a time.
Devil's Backbone. Devil's Gate. Devil's Gulch. Devil's Kettle. Devil's Kitchen. Devil's Punchbowl. Devil's Sinkhole. Devil's Millhopper. Devil's Icebox. Devil's Honeycomb. Devil's Cornfield. Devil's Golf Course. Devil's Washbowl. Devil's Hopyard.
Thirty-seven of them, in twenty-two states, and not one is a place where anything terrible is recorded as having happened.
A backbone is a ridge too steep to take a wagon over. A gate is a gap in a cliff that you must go through because there is no way round. A gulch is a ravine. A kettle, a punchbowl, a millhopper, a sinkhole — all holes in the ground that water disappears into and does not obviously come out of. An icebox is a cave mouth that breathes cold air in July.
The Devil's Cornfield in Death Valley is a plain of arrowweed clumps standing in rows, looking exactly like a crop, in a place where nothing can be grown. The Devil's Golf Course, a few miles away, is rock salt eroded into blades sharp enough to cut through boot leather — the name comes from a 1934 guidebook line about only the devil being able to play golf on it.
The Devil's Kettle in Minnesota is a pothole that swallows half a river. Where the water went was genuinely unknown for decades; it was only resolved recently, and the answer was unglamorous — it rejoins the river downstream.
None of these is a haunting. Every one is a piece of terrain that beat somebody.
Settlers named land by what it was worth to them. Good ground got a family name or a hopeful one — Fair Valley, Richland, Prospect. Ground that could not be ploughed, crossed, drained or understood got handed to the Devil, because that is who you blame for a landscape that appears designed to waste your time.
It is a practical vocabulary wearing a theological coat. Calling a ravine the Devil's Gulch tells the next traveller exactly what they need to know about that ravine.
And once a name like that is on a map it does not come off. Places that are now state parks, tourist attractions and national monuments carry a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century verdict on their usefulness, delivered by people who wanted to farm them.
Wyoming's is the famous one — a monolith of columnar rock, the first national monument, and by most accounts a mistranslation. The Lakota and other nations have their own names for it, several of which refer to bears. A US Army interpreter in 1875 is generally blamed for turning one of them into "Bad God's Tower", and the map did the rest.
Then there is the other Devil's Tower, in Alpine, New Jersey: a water tower built by a millionaire in the 1920s, with a legend attached about a wife who fell from it. That one is a folk story in the ordinary sense, invented about a building, after the fact.
Two objects, one name, arrived at from opposite directions. The Wyoming one was named by a bureaucratic error about a sacred site. The New Jersey one was named by people telling each other a story in the dark.
The list is full of both, and you cannot tell which is which without looking.
