LUCKY SEVERSON, anchor: Each August, for about two weeks hundreds of thousands of bikers roar into Sturgis, South Dakota. It's the world's largest motorcycle rally -- a huge, noisy affair, and it continues to get bigger and louder. Businessmen love it. They keep building bigger and bigger bars on the outskirts of town, ever closer to the mount known as Bear Butte. And that's a problem, because for thousands of Native Americans, Bear Butte is a very sacred place.
We're at the base of Bear Butte near skeletons of sweat lodges, where trees are adorned with prayer ribbons. This is Tom Van Norman with the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe.TOM VAN NORMAN (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe): We're standing right here in part of what our people would call "Hae So Poro," the heart of everything that is. And it's the ancestral territory we're living in, we'll be living in. We stand here. We come here. We'll keep coming here forever, as long as we live and breathe.
EUGENE BLUE ARM (Lakota Sioux Elder): When you come here it's to gain a solitude that's necessary for prayer and deep thought. SEVERSON: Gene Blue Arm is a Lakota Sioux elder. To him the bars and the motorcycles are a disrespectful intrusion into the solitude and the sanctity of Bear Butte, motorcycles much noisier than the one Jay Allen was clinging to when he set a world speed record rocketing across the Bonneville Salt Flats.
JAY ALLEN (Developer): To hear a Harley rolling up Highway 79 in the distance -- it's not something of annoyance. It's really something -- if you're within yourself on a religious form I doubt that it would even bother you. But to me it's a sweet sound. It's a beautiful thing.
SEVERSON: Allen sees nothing disrespectful about the bar he built a couple miles from Bear Butte, a bar he calls the biggest biker bar on planet Earth. He's also building a campsite large enough to accommodate 30,000 bikers and a huge amphitheater for outdoor concerts.
Mr. ALLEN: The Native Americans did everything they could within their powers to stop me, and I give them credit. They're very tenacious. But, you know, when you're in the right that's a tough thing to fight, and what you believe you're doing in your heart, that's a tougher thing to fight, and I think that is why I have prevailed.
SEVERSON: We caught up with Allen on a mountain top he owns in Northern California. He explained that so far he is winning the court challenges to his bar, challenges against selling liquor so close to a sacred place.
Mr. ALLEN: You know, they wanted a five-mile buffer around that mountain, and I don't blame them for wanting it. They love that mountain. Hell, if I was them, I'd want a 25-mile buffer around it. But you go to town, and people have churches within 500 feet of a bar, and they haven't lost their religion.
BRUCE ELLISON (Attorney): In many religions, though, you can pick up your church and move it. You can't move this butte.SEVERSON: Bruce Ellison is a private attorney who represents the Sioux tribe.
Mr. ELLISON: We have a federal law -- Indian Religious Freedom Act -- designed to respect and promote and encourage federal agencies to allow for protection of sacred sites and to allow ceremonies to be conducted the way they always have been. And almost every time people have gone to court to protect those rights against money, the religion of the non-Indian community, the Indian people have lost.
SEVERSON: Archaeologists estimate that native people have been around the Black Hills for 11,000 years. Legend has it that a Cheyenne named Sweet Medicine climbed to the top of Bear Butte more than 4,000 years ago. In 1857, 30,000 Cheyenne gathered here to figure out how to stop the white men from encroaching on their sacred lands. Today, members of as many as 30 tribes consider Bear Butte one of their most sacred sites.
Valerie Taliman is with the Indian Law Resource Center.
VALERIE TALIMAN (Indian Law Resource Center): How can people not see it? This is a church. This is a school. If there is not a county ordinance protecting it, there should be.SEVERSON: Each year for centuries, especially during the summer months, Native Americans come to Bear Butte to collect herbs and medicine plants and commune with nature. They also come here for what is called a "vision quest" which can last for several days and nights. Gene Blue Arm says some who go up to the mountain hear voices and receive messages.
Mr. BLUE ARM: You need solitude. You need to be quiet. You need to look at the -- and experience -- the elements like the wind. You can hear messages in the wind.
Ms. TALIMAN: You're sitting there for four days, four nights in the elements. It might be 105 degrees, and it might be 30 degrees outside. That person is praying constantly, maybe taking only water, not eating for four days. It's a meditation of sorts. It's introspective. You look at yourself. You say, how do I become a better person?
CARL MEYER (Missionary, Mennonite Central Committee): Oftentimes, people will say, "Well, if they really want to have peace around Bear Butte, they should buy up that land themselves, and then Jay Allen won't be able to build his bar, right?" 
SEVERSON: Allen says he thinks the issue will eventually blow away, and that one day he and Native Americans will share Bear Butte together.
SEVERSON: But the tribes face long odds and increasing pressure to back away. More mega-bars and amphitheaters are planned. And in 2007, promoters are anticipating as many as 650,000 bikers, almost as numerous as the buffalo that once grazed the land surrounding Bear Butte. 
