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dred feet high. At the boundary line it is forty-five miles wide, 

 though it seems to mark the escarpment of a western table- 

 land. Wood Mountain, which rises to 3,800 feet above the sea 

 level, is about twenty miles north of the boundary line, and is 

 but a higher elevation of the Missouri coteau. There is in gen- 

 eral no rock on this remarkable elevation. It is a mass of drift 

 perhaps marking the margin of some ancient inland sea or lake. 

 The couteau is covered with pointed hillocks, and toward it 

 western side runs into what the French half-breeds call the 

 "Mauvaises terres," or arid lands, which, with their rough and 

 endless succession of dry and treeless hills, ridges, and desert 

 features, an American writer has described as "a tulmultuous 

 expanse of baked mud." Yet from this irregular mass of con- 

 fused terrain streams as tributaries run northward into the 

 Souris, and south into the Missouri. For many miles parallel 

 to this great coteau, the Souris river pursues its course through 

 Dakota. It is on the summit of this coteau, to the south of 

 a point where the Souris leaves it, that another monumnt still 

 more famous in the history of the west and of the Indian na- 

 tions, is found, the 



RED PIPESTONE QUARRY. 



This is the very centre of Indian poetry in i romitve. .Here 

 is found seemingly the only deposit known of red pipestone, cf 

 which almost every American tribe has examples, and of which 

 I present you this evening two specimens from the mounds 

 on the Souris. The writer has found a gray pipestone — a spe- 

 cies of steatite on an island in the Lake of the Woods — from 

 which the Indians of that region make pipes, but it is around 

 the red pipestone that Indian tradition gathers. The first white 

 man to visit the red pipestone quarry on the Missouri Coteau, or 

 "Coteau des prairies," was the Indian traveller Catlin in 1836. 

 The specimens brought by him were analyzed, and the new 

 mineral "not steatite, harder than gypsum, and softer than car- 

 bon of lime," a red argillite, similar to that seen forming near 

 Nipigon on the C.P.R. line is called in science Catlinite in hon- 

 or of the traveller. On the top of the Coteau at the quarry 

 there is a perpendicular wall of quartz beds — light grey or in 

 some cases of flesh color — twenty-five feet in elevation and run- 

 ning for nearly two miles from north to south, the surface both 

 of the perpendicular side, and for acres on the top being highly 

 polished and glazed as if by ignition. At the base of this wall 

 for half a mile in width is a level prairie. Near the wall and on 

 the flat lower surface are five enormous boulders of gneiss rock' 



