258 Wisco72sin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



to the Minnesota and Dakota outcrops in the thinness of the beds. 

 The stratum from which the' specimen herewith submitted was 

 taken is perhaps eight inches thick, intercalated between heavy 

 layers of quartzite, and was uncovered in the course of excavating 

 a railroad borrow-pit. As quarried it is quite brittle, so that large 

 pieces are obtained with difficulty. It hardens considerably as 

 the moisture dries out. If an exposure should be discovered in 

 which the stone was cheaply accessible over a considerable area, 

 it would possess a commercial value for the ornamental uses 

 which will readily suggest themselves to one who examines a 

 dressed specimen. The stone has been somewhat used as a mate- 

 rial for tobacco pipes by present residents of the locality, but no 

 systematic effort to utilize it has been made, for the reasons indi- 

 cated. Shortly before I was at Sioux Falls, then Fort Dakota, 

 some white men had poached upon the Minnesota pipestone 

 reservation to their considerable profit, it was said. They set up 

 turning lathes at the Fort, and, transporting supplies of the red 

 stone from the quarry with team?, applied machinery to the man- 

 ufacture of the calumet, which they modeled upon the Indian 

 hand-made article. They shipped the finished product to some 

 military post on the upper Missouri by a supply steamer, and 

 there bartered it with the red men for pelts and skins, to the great 

 advantage of both parties possibly, and of the whites probably, 

 if not certainly. 



