646 A TRIP TO PIPESTONE QUARRY. 
the two medicine rocks, where they remain to this day as 
guardian spirits of the place, and must be propitiated by any 
one wishing to obtain the Pipestone before it can be taken 
away.” : 
While tracing up to their original ledges in North-western 
Iowa and the adjacent parts of Dakota and Minnesota, the 
boulders of red quartzite profusely scattered in the drift of 
Western Iowa and Eastern N ebraska, I was led to visit this 
famous locality, and now propose to give a brief description 
of its real character and surroundings. But while correcting 
the fallacies of the Indian legends, no wish is entertained of 
diminishing popular interest in them, nor in the beautiful 
rendering of them by the poet; yet every naturalist, how- 
ever attractive legendary lore or poetic forms of expression 
may be to him, really desires to know the exact truth, even 
if it diminishes the pleasure he feels in the enchanting nar- 
rations of story or song. 
eaving Sioux City and going northward along the east 
side of the Big Sioux River, we soon pass the northern 
limit of the bluff formation, with the strange beauty of its 
smoothly rounded hills, described in a former number of the 
Natura.ist, and enter upon the broad prairie which con- 
tinues without interruption far to the eastward, still farther 
to the northward into. Minnesota, and farther still to the 
westward towards the Rocky Mountains. Rocks of Cre- 
taceous age are occasionally exposed in the bluffs of the 
river for a dozen miles above its mouth, but being friable, 
they are soon lost from sight beneath their own, debris and 
the heavy drift-mantle that everywhere covers the earth: 
and the only rocks we see in many miles of travel are occa- 
sional boulders of granite and red quartzite embedded in the 
deep, rich soil. Streams of considerable size traverse some 
portions of this wide region, but they are hardly able to 
arrest the fierce fires of the prairie which annually prevail, 
for they rush up to their very margins, and sometimes even 
leap the watery space aud carry on their work of destruction 
