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Owatonna, MN → Pipestone, MN → St. Paul, MN 522.0 mi (840.1 km) |
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It’s piping cold, everyone!
Today, I headed in the exact opposite direction from Effigy Mounds National Monument to the western edge of Minnesota. Here, the wind was brisk and gusty, and I was about to check another national monument off my list. This one was called Pipestone National Monument, and it’s truly a hidden gem!
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Pipestone National Monument is pretty tiny by volume with just two trails, the longest being only three quarters of a mile long! That’s because it’s dedicated to preserving a small group of stone quarries that have been harvested by Native folks for at least 2,000 years! It was super quiet today, because as I learned the hard way, Pipestone National Monument is closed on Sundays! That made it just right for going out to stroll!
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Down the South Quarry Trail were a long row of open pits surrounded by chunks of rock knocked loose from their beds. Here, folks who have gotten a permit from the National Park Service can still dig for pipestone, but it’s no easy task! First, you have to be a member of a federally recognized tribe and have your own tools. Then, you’d have to decide whether you want to access a pit for a day, a week, a month, or a year! You might not even dig deep enough to reach the pipestone in under a month, but if you want an annual permit, you might have to wait as long as ten years from application to digging!
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As for why it takes so long to get to this monument’s namesake stone, the layer of pipestone is sandwiched between two thick beds of quartzite. Quartzite is super-compacted sandstone that’s recrystallized under heat and pressure, making it harder than steel and therefore very time-consuming to break through if you’re opening up a fresh pit!
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And here’s a slab of what’s brought generations of folks back to backbreaking work at these quarries! The pipestone here, also called catlinite, is different from other types of pipestone because it doesn’t have any quartz in it! It was once a kind of iron-rich clay that was squeezed between layers of sand thousands of feet thick, but unlike the quartzite that surrounds it, this pipestone is super soft, which makes it ideal for carving!
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As you might guess, pipestone mostly gets carved into pipes, ceremonial pipes to be precise. The stone part is T-shaped and attached to a hollowed out wooden stem. Pipes would be filled with tobacco along with aromatic prairie plants like sweetgrass and prairie rose to make sweet-smelling smoke that would carry their prayers up to the Great Spirit! As I strolled around the pits, I noticed lots of medicine bundles in the trees, just like at Devils Tower and Wind Cave. These are left as offerings to the spirits who reside in this sacred place!
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Not everyone treated this place with equal respect, though. It was longstanding tradition that folks did not camp near the quarry, but in 1857, renegade Dakota leader, Inkpaduta, and his followers made their camp here on the tallgrass prairie, having massacred 35 or 40 settlers in Iowa and taken four young women captive. One of those captives, Abbie Gardner, later pointed out the location of their camp, now marked by this sign.
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Speaking of that tallgrass prairie, Pipestone National Monument preserves much more than just stone! All of the Great Plains used to be covered by tallgrass prairie, but now only a few select preserves remain across the Midwest! The patch of prairie that’s preserved here is home to over 300 native plant species!
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But beyond the prairies and the quarries, at the apex of the Circle Trail was something magnificent: an alcove of deep red cliffs! When I first beheld them, I was convinced I was looking at a huge mass of pure pipestone, which would have been an amazing find!
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There were lots of medicine bundles hanging around these cliffs, which also made me think they were pure pipestone. Then I had to wonder, if this was all pipestone, why had no one dug it up?!
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Well, as you might guess, these red cliffs were not pipestone! They were that Sioux quartzite, which, it turns out, also has red hematite in it! The pipestone layer actually drops at an 8˚ angle from the visitor center, so by the time it reaches these cliffs, it’s actually about 100 feet below ground! That didn’t make these cliffs any less beautiful, though!
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And they even formed some unique shapes, like this one, The Oracle, which looks like the profile of an old man! While folks leave offerings for The Oracle today, it’s unclear how far back that folklore goes. Some tribes claim it’s always been important, while others say it park superintendent, Lyle Linch, created stories about The Oracle for tourists back in the 1940s. Either way, it was a neat stop on this quartzite circuit!
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Atop the cliffs, I found a plaque and some signatures carved into the rock. These were left by the sixteen members of the Joseph Nicolas Nicollet expedition when they camped here from June 29th to July 6th, 1838! Mr. Nicollet was a French geographer, mathematician, and astronomer who made three huge journeys to map out the Upper Mississippi River Basin. He surveyed the pipestone quarries on his second journey, and while he was known for respecting Native folks, his maps paved the way for lots of other folks who did not share his level of respect.
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And nowhere was this clearer than Winnewissa Falls, a rare sight on the flat prairie! Here, Pipestone Creek flows over the cliffs, creating a glorious cascade! At least one story tells that the Great Spirit, on dedicating this site as sacred, finished smoking the first pipe and brought forth the waterfall as a final sign of the place’s importance! However, there were signs warning visitors not to step in the water, not because it was inherently dangerous, but because the water itself was unsanitary!
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Yes folks, the water that poured down over Winnewissa Falls, into Hiawatha Lake, and beyond, has become hopelessly contaminated with agricultural runoff: pesticides and cow poo, all flowing through this sacred site. While some state and local agencies, like the Pipestone Soil and Water Conservation District, have programs and incentives to help farmers dispose of their farm waste better, it’s going to take a long time and a lot of effort to clean up this 53.2-mile long creek! The hope is that one day, folks can make full traditional use of Pipestone without fear for their health!
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As I finished my circuit of the monument, I stopped to pay tribute to the Three Maidens. These are the remains of a huge granite boulder that was deposited here in the last Ice Age, called a glacial erratic! There are lots of stories surrounding these three huge stones, some saying that three maidens found refuge here from danger or were assigned to stay here by the Great Spirit. Either way, they’re considered the homes of the quarry’s guardian spirits, but they’ve been mistreated a lot over the years. The annual Hiawatha Pageant, a performance of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, used the Three Maidens as a backdrop from 1948 until 2008 and at one point, a hapless worker drilled a hole in one of the stones to stabilize the props! Today, there are signs up reminding folks not to climb on the Three Maidens, and one can only hope that, like the river, this place will become pure again!
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For a long time, the knowledge of this place, of the Maidens and the pipes, was suppressed as the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 called for places like the Pipestone Indian School to be built. Kids from all over the Midwest, not just the Dakota, but also the Oneida, Pottawatomie, Arikaree, Sac, and Fox, were forced to attend this school so their traditional ways and understanding could be replaced by Euro-Christian ones. This system had a devastating impact on the cultures and languages of the people of the Plains, and across the country. Thankfully, enough survived to revive what is left, and today, only the crumbling remains of the Superintendent’s House still stand as a reminder of this cruel period in history.
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As my last stop on my way out of town, I paid a visit to the Keepers Gift Shop and Gallery, housed in a historic Rock Island Depot and proudly displaying the World’s Largest Peace Pipe out front! Inside, the shopkeeper, Mr. Bud Johnston, told me about the nonprofit headquartered here that’s really helping to keep the ancient traditions of Pipestone alive! Called Keepers of the Sacred Tradition of Pipemakers, this group not only archives histories and styles surrounding pipe making, but they also organize workshops on pipe making and the rituals that surround them! Most special of all, they help folks of Native descent connect with their ancestral tribe! Mr. Johnston even told me about one woman who didn’t want to know her ancestry but had her entire life changed when she found out she was Oneida and went to visit the tribe in Green Bay, Wisconsin!
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The national monuments on this weekend trip had a lot in common, petite in size but enormous in their cultural history! It was a bit of a stretch getting to them both out of Minneapolis, but it was so cool not only exploring my main destinations but also the neat spots I found along the way! It was pretty chilly up here, though, so I think on my next trip, I’m going to warm up a little further south.
‘Til spring springs at the Springs!
P.S. On my way back to the airport, I just had to stop and see the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota! This icon of American veggies was born from the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, who started growing a distastefully large kind of pea that they needed to sell. Thus, the Green Giant (pea) was born in 1925! This mighty statue of him has been standing here, watching over I-90, since September 23, 1978!
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Total Ground Covered: 1,252.0 mi (1,854.0 km) |
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