240 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



Through this curious sceue I was strolling a lew days since with my wife, and I 

 observed the Indian women gathering around her anxious to shake hands with her 

 and show her their children, of which she took especial notice; and they literally 

 rilled her hands and her arms with muk-lcuks of maple sugar, which they manufacture 

 and had brought in great quantities for sale. — G. C. 



335. Sioux village, Lake Calhoun, near Fort Snelling; lodges built with poles. 



Painted in 1835. 



336. Coteau des Prairies, headwaters of the Saint Peter's; my companion, Mr. 



Wood,* Indian guide, and myself, encamping at sunset, cooking by our tire 

 made of buffalo chips. 



Mr. Catlin visited the Red Pipestone quarries in 1836. (See Itinerary 

 for 1836.) He went east from Saint Louis in 1835, leaving his family at 

 his father's, and thence he went to Buffalo, across the lake to the Falls 

 of Saint Anthony, and then on horseback to the Bed Pipestone quarry, 

 now in Pipestone County, Minnesota. 



Mr. Catlin was the first white man permitted by the Indians to visit 

 the Coteau des Prairies. It has since been visited by many travelers 

 and described, but the Indian has departed. 



337. Pipestone Quarry, on the Coteau des Prairies, three hundred miles northwest 



from the Falls of Saint Anthony, on the divide between the Saint Peter's 

 and Missouri. Painted in 1836. 



(Plate No. 270, page 164, vol. 2, Catlin's Eight Years.) 



The place where the Indians get the stone for all their red pipes, the mineral, red 

 steatite,\ variety differing from any other known locality; wall of solid, compact 

 quartz, gray and rose color, highly polished as if vitrified ; the wall is two miles in 

 length and thirty feet high, with a beautiful cascade leaping from its top into a basin. 

 On the prairie, at the base of the wall, the pipeclay {steatite) is dug up at two and 

 three feet depth. There are seen five immense granite bowlders, under which there 

 are two squaws, according to their tradition, who eternally dwell there — the guardian 

 spirits of the place — and must be consulted before the pipestone can be dug up. 



The position of the pipestone quarry is in a direction nearly west from the Fall of 

 Saint Anthony, at a distance of three hundred miles, on the summit of the dividing 

 ridge between the Saint Peter's and the Missouri Eivers, being about equidistant from 

 either. This dividing ridge is denominated by the French the Coteau des Prairies, 

 and the pipestone quarry is situated near its southern extremity, and consequently 

 not exactly on its highest elevation, as its general course is north and south, and its 

 southern extremity terminates in a gradual slope. 



Our approach to it was from the east, and the ascent, for the distance of fifty miles, 

 over a continued succession of slopes and terraces, almost imperceptibly rising one 

 above another, that seemed to lift us to a great height. The singular character of 

 this majestic mound continues on the west side, in its descent toward the Missouri. 



* Mr. Catlin was accompanied by an Englishman, Mr. Robert Serrell "Wood. 



t The red pipestone of the North American Indians is now called "Catlinite," after Mr. Catlin, so 

 named by Dr. Jackson, of Boston. For a comprehensive and exhaustive paper on Catlinite, its antiq- 

 uity as a material for tohacco pipes, see American Naturalist, July, 1883, by Edwin A. Barber, esq., of 

 Philadelphia. This paper contains much descriptive text relative to the Coteau and the country ad- 

 jacent. 



Catlinite is now found at several points in Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, notably at Flandreau 

 and Sioux Falls, Dakota; Blue Earth River and Sauk County, Iowa; Pipestone, Cottonwood, "Waton- 

 wan, and Nicollet Counties, Minnesota, and in Barron County, Wisconsin. The color ranges from 

 deep red to an ash-colored variety. 



" Say, hast thou seen the calumet of pink or purple bright, 

 A pipe-bowl in the council, a hatchet inthe fight?"— [Hiawatha— JET. W. Longfellow. 



