
CE fee eee ee 

A TRIP TO PIPESTONE QUARRY. 647 
beyond. A few clumps of willows upon their margins, and 
a few groves upon the islands or in the bends of the streams, 
only escape destruction, and are the only objects remaining 
to give diversity to the landscape, except the bald bluffs bor- 
dering the larger streams. 
_A journey of eighty miles over such a country as this 
brings us to the north-western corner of the State of Iowa, 
where we first find ledges of the red quartzite in place, 
which we have traced as scattered boulders, step by step 
from the Missouri state line, more than two hundred miles 
away to the southward. 
Following up the Big Sioux from this point, we find the 
quartzite exposed at frequent intervals along the valley, and 
reaching Sioux Falls, twenty miles by way of the crooked 
river, but only ten miles in a direct line north-westward from 
the State corner, we find a magnificent exposure of the same 
rock extending across the river, and- causing a series of falls 
of sixty feet in aggregate height, within the distance of half 
a mile, which for romantic beauty are seldom surpassed. 
This quartzite is of a nearly uniform brick-red color, in- 
tensely hard, quite regularly bedded, the bedding surfaces 
sometimes showing ripple markings as distinct as any to be 
seen upon the sea-shore of the present day, and which were 
made in the same manner untold ages ago, when this hard 
rock was a mass of incoherent sand, the grains of which are 
even now distinctly visible. In a few localities it presents 
the characters of conglomerate, the pebbles being as clearly 
silicious as the grains of sand. At Sioux Falls, Fort Dakota 
is located. Those who have never enjoyed the hospitality 
of onr distant military posts, cannot appreciate the full 
. meaning of that. word as we did, in the welcome extended 
to our tired party, by Col. Wm. A. Olmstead, the Comman- 
dant, and Dr. J. Frazer Boughter, the Surgeon. 
After divers and sundry ablutions, rendered all the more 
necessary by many days of toil and travel upon the open 
prairie beneath a July sun, we prepare ourselves for a -day’s 
