HELLISH NAME TORMENTS SOME PLAINS RESIDENTS.

Byline: James Brooke The New York Times

In the language wars between whites and Indians, peace has prevailed over this windswept patch of the plains, a land where life is defined by farming, fishing and Friday night blackjack.

On one side of North Dakota's largest natural lake, members of the Devils Lake Sioux Tribe have voted to change their name to Spirit Lake Dakotah Nation.

``The settlers misinterpreted our name for the lake, Mni Wakan, or Spirit Water, Holy Water,'' Joe Chaske, the tribe's chief judge, said over dinner recently at the tribe's casino. As slot machines rang inside, the word ``Spirit'' glowed in purple neon above the new casino building.

On the far side of the lake, the virtually all-white townspeople of Devils Lake are sticking with their name, partly out of loyalty to the revered local high school football team, the Satans.

``Every once in a while, we'll get a letter from a little old nun somewhere, and she'll say we'll go to hell if we don't change the name,'' said Gordon Wexel, editor of The Devils Lake Daily Journal, the local newspaper.

After weathering such criticism, residents say they are understanding, but unmoved, by Indian arguments over the mistranslation.

``We picked our name, but they never really had a chance to pick their name,'' said Fred Bott, a local high school history teacher who also serves as the mayor of this town of 9,000 people. ``No one likes a name put on you.''

Offering the best fishing between Bismarck and the Canadian border, the town of Devils Lake also has name recognition to protect. Residents, proud of their position as one of North Dakota's top tourist attractions, fear that fishermen driving from Wisconsin might get lost trying to find Spirit Lake on the map.

In contrast, concern over name recognition is fueling a war of words around the base of Devils Tower, Wyo.

Local Indian tribes consider the name blasphemous. According to tribal lore, the massive butte is a tree stump, scored by the claws of a grizzly bear. A holy site for tribal religions, the tower carries such traditional names as Bear's Lodge and Bear's Lair.

``The tower had a name for a long time before the whites ever showed up,'' said Tim Giago, editor of Indian Country Today, a weekly that has long campaigned against the use of Indian names for logos or mascots of sports teams. ``It was long a place of worship. It's like calling the Vatican the House of the Devil.''

On the other hand, the local white population, moved partly by sentimental attachment and partly by strong commercial name recognition, demand that the name stay the same. Renowned across the land, in part because it was the main locale for the film ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' Devils Tower National Monument drew almost half a million tourists last year to the site in Wyoming's remote northeast corner.

Sniffing political correction in the air, some Westerners fear that American geographers may send the word ``devil'' the way of ``squaw.'' Many states are dropping ``squaw'' from place names, partly because of a linguistic argument that the word is a French corruption of an Algonquin epithet for vagina.

``We'll be busy in Colorado if the Devil must also be exorcised here,'' said Ed Quillen, a columnist for The Denver Post. Running down some of his favorite Colorado haunts, he listed Devil's Slide, Devil's Point, Devil's Thumb, Devil's Nose and Devil's Backbone.

In Mesa, Ariz., Spook Hill became Spirit Hill last year after complaints by the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

But there is no national movement to replace ``devil'' with ``spirit,'' according to one arbiter on such matters, the Interior Department's United States Board on Geographic Names. The board's American place name data base shows that ``devil'' outnumbers ``spirit'' by 1,672 to 287, or almost 6 to 1.