1. Sioux charity declined and risk of pneumonia – 2. Conspiracy theories on Graveyard Tales – 3. A weather forecast at Subway – 4. A distasteful moniker – 5. Pipestone merchants – 6. What does Grandpa have to say about predation and the Good Earth? – 7. An excursion into Iowa – 8. Pettigrew’s map of the Silent City – 9. The “pitted boulder” at Blood Run – “xe” (“it is buried”) – 10. Funkier than a Santa Fe “flea market” – 11. Sioux Quartzite (Mohs hardness 7) takes center stage – 12. In the dock – 13. Pettigrew’s artifacts and old major Amberson – 14. Feather semantics and pony grammar – 15. The most incompetent painter of them all – 16. Steel rolled oats and petrified wood at the Falls – 17. Ghost Choir – 18. Black and White v. Technicolor – 19. Period wallpaper, original carpet and a closet full of grey stones – 20. Triumphant Plutocracy indicted and a forgotten Marxist – 21. A Giant from Venice – 22. The Rose-Red City on the Prairie – 23. Bitch’s Brew – 24. The mighty scales of Justice – 25. “By the shining big sea water...” – 26. Except in special circumstances, avoid the catlinite pendants – 27. President Lincoln and the Nephillim – 28. An Invisible Attraction – 29. Chilled to the Bone – 30. There were Giants in those Days.
1.
Returning from the petroglyphs, I was chilled. The car’s climate control was set to 62 degrees on my side of the console, a comfortable driving temperature but too cold if you are wet. It was 61 degrees outside in the steady drizzle that had darkened the day. My daughter, Angelica, also was wet, but she was more practical – she dialed up the temperature on the passenger side of the car to 78 degrees. I had declined an offer of assistance at the petroglyphs and was trembling now with cold. It was two hours and eighteen minutes by highway to my home in Austin.
At the McDonald’s in Blue Earth, the rain was harder and the horizons had vanished in the metallic bluish mist. Rain invaded the car at the drive-through. Outside it was 58.
I couldn’t get warm when I reached home and my wife brought out a blanket that I wrapped around myself like an invalid.
The Germans say: “There is no bad weather only bad clothing.”
2.
On the highway from the Jeffers Petroglyphs to Blue Earth, a zigzag route that runs east, then, south, then, east again on county highways – in rural south central Minnesota there are no diagonals, no hypotenuse to the right-angle roads – Angelica tuned the radio to a podcast about giants. (She subscribes to Graveyard Tales, a broadcast in which a couple of avuncular good old boys discuss paranormal and Fortean subjects; the hosts are Adam and Matt who encourage their listeners to sit on a tombstone or get comfortable in their caskets while they regale them with weird tales.) The presence of giants in the American Midwest is said to be extensively documented. Nineteenth century preachers pointed to giant skeletons unearthed from Native American burial mounds as evidence of the truth of scripture – the Bible says that the Nephillim were giants who begot a race of heroes, the mighty men of old, on the “daughters of men.” Apparently, the Nephillim and their progeny took up residence in what is now Ohio and Kansas and Wisconsin where their bones were interred in cyclopean mounds and embankments, also the work of these giants. Unfortunately, the discoverers of these skeletal remains had faith in science and the probity of the Smithsonian Institution and, so, the bones were sent to that collection for analysis. At the Smithsonian, this skeletal evidence fell into the custody of someone named Ales Hrdlicka, a Bohemian-born anthropologist who founded the Department of Physical Anthropology in the Washington institute in 1903. Hrdlicka is said to have been a fanatical advocate for Darwinian evolution and, in fact, believed that the human occupation of the Americas was not more than three-thousand years old. It is claimed that Hrdlicka destroyed all artifacts contrary to his views of human evolution and, so, he directed that the many hundreds of crates containing enormous human bones be burned or hidden somewhere among the millions of anthropological specimens warehoused by the Smithsonian. As a result, no bones exist today documenting the presence of the American giants although many photographs show the immense relics. In 2014, the American Institute of Alternative Archaeology (AIAA) published claims by Smithsonian whistleblowers that Hrdlicka had orchestrated the destruction of the giant skeletal remains proving the existence of the giants.
Smithsonian officials were offended by these assertions and commenced a lawsuit against the AIAA for defamation. This turned out to be a mistake since evidence was produced in the litigation that the Smithsonian had, in fact, concealed and destroyed skeletal remains proving the existence of giant humans – creatures between eight and 20 feet tall. The Smithsonian appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court where the Justices issued an order confirming that Ales Hrdlicka and his minions had destroyed hundreds, if not thousands, of bones demonstrating the existence of a race of giants. This decision, according to Adam and Matt of Graveyard Tales, was issued in 2015.
I found this information intriguing and thought that I would read the Supreme Court case when I reached home. The rain splashed on the windshield and, at Blue Earth, just off Interstate 90, I saw a giant towering over a roadside park on the outskirts of the town. The giant was green and forty feet tall surveying the knot of roads at the intersection and the wet trucks passing on the freeway.
3.
A day earlier, Angelica and I drove west to Sioux Falls. She had the day off-work and, so, I thought we would take a short excursion to eastern South Dakota.
The day was mostly clear and warm, but humid with shoals of moist cloud skittering across the sky. When we stopped at a Subway in Laverne, Minnesota about twenty miles from the South Dakota border, the woman at the counter asked us if we were ready for rain. The storms, she said, were coming.
4.
Good Earth at Blood Run is a recently developed South Dakota State Park. The park protects wooded bluffs and meadows overlooking the Big Sioux River and a network of trails leads to overlooks above the river bottoms and flood plains. The land on the stream’s east bank is located in Iowa. Sioux Falls with its current population of 200,000 is rapidly growing and the city’s suburbs sprawl out to open terrain dotted with tracts of expensive-looking houses interspersed with shopping malls and medical clinics. Some the tracts of houses flank golf courses. The Good Earth park, it seems, was established to preserve the last natural terrain between the city (downtown is eleven miles away) and the Iowa border defined by the Big Sioux River. Urban development will inevitably isolate Good Earth State Park among malls and office buildings and neighborhoods of large new homes within a matter of four or five years. From the park visitor center, golf courses and a clinic on a ridge and some tracts of houses are visible.
Blood Run is the name of a meandering creek incised in the Big Sioux terraces on the Iowa side of the river. Accounts vary as to the sinister name: some people think the creek is named after a pioneer family, the Bludd’s; others imagine inter-tribal warfare and a massacre at the confluence of the stream and river; most likely, the name refers to hematite leaching from deposits of gravel buried on the hillsides above the river and imparting a faint reddish hue to the waters. The State Park in South Dakota was developed with the cooperation of the Indian tribes that once lived in this area and they found the name “Blood Run” distasteful. No one knows what the Indian village at this place was called by its inhabitants and, so, a compromise seems to have been reached: the park’s official name is Good Earth State Park at Blood Run.
5.
On the Iowa side of the Big Sioux, at the place where the creek snakes down from the tall-grass prairie to the river, a large Indian village, really more on the order of a city, flourished between about 1500 and 1714. More than six-thousand people lived in the town, a sizeable number when it is considered that around this time, Boston, in the decades after its founding, boasted a population of about 2000. The Blood Run village was inhabited by the Oneota, a late prehistoric (or proto-historic) people, who dispersed into various other tribes at the beginning of the 18th century. Modern or historic Indian tribes that claim affiliation with the ancestral Oneota are the Omaha and Ponca, Iowa, Missouria, Otoe, Hochunk (Winnebago), Kansa, and Osage.
It is not clear to me whether the Oneota culture really existed or if it is a notional category used for convenience to designate a group of closely related, but, nonetheless, distinct tribal groups. The term first appears in 1958 in Willey and Phillips Method and Theory in American Archaeology. According to those authors, the Oneota’s emergent horizon (or origin) was about 950 AD with its classic era, the so-called “Oneota aspect”, between about 1500 and 1650, more or less the dates of the village at Blood Run. No one really knows if this group of people, widely dispersed throughout the Midwest, emigrated into their homelands in southern Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and the eastern Dakotas from some other place or if they developed in situ possibly from Woodland era (generally 800 BC to 1250 AD) precursors. It appears that these Indians were sedentary, occupying villages adjacent to ridged fields that they farmed. The Oneota cultivated squash, beans, corn, and sunflowers and, supplemented their diet by hunting. At the time of their florescence, the Midwest consisted of vast open prairies interspersed with bur oak savanna – the terrain was a kind of paradise for hoofed creatures such as bison, deer, elk, and antelope.
In the study of archaeology, it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between a tribal group or constellation of groups and the technology that characterizes them. Literally speaking, Oneota signifies a kind of distinctive globular pottery, ceramic fortified with an admixture of ground white mussel-shell kneaded into the clay. Oneota arrowheads are tiny, neither serrated nor notched, and razor sharp. Hunters aimed their arrows at the vitals of bison and other prey, killing the beasts by lithic points penetrating deep into the animals’ bodies. Oneota villages were trading emporiums on the frontier between the eastern woodland Indians and the people who lived on the Great Plains. The people seem to have been shrewd and successful merchants and their village sites are full of trade goods. (Their relation to the metropolis at Cahokia that was at its height around 1200 A.D. is unclear; I suspect that their culture evolved in opposition to the urban Mississippians – a bit like the Navajo suspicions hostile to the Chaco Canyon phenomenon.) Long before they had actual contact with European traders, the Oneota possessed Dutch and Bohemian beads, metal objects, and fabrics made in Quebec and on the East Coast. The Oneota at Blood Run controlled the pipestone (catlinite) quarry fifty miles to the northeast in what is now Pipestone county in Minnesota. Pipestone “pre-form” tablets and other artifacts made from the soft rock have been unearthed in great numbers at the village and its environs. It is obvious that Plains Indians traded with the Oneota for the pipestone, acquiring the rock either in cubical blocks or carved into calumets. Native Americans held pipestone in high esteem and it’s role with respect to tobacco and pipe ceremonies was integral to these cultures – probably, the stone had greater value than gold and was thought to be half-alive, the red flesh of the earth. Trade in pipestone made the Oneota villagers on the Big Sioux wealthy.
Not only was pipestone fashioned into pipes, oblong and rectangular tablets of the stuff were incised with images. Some of these image-tablets have been found near the Oneota village site; the smooth surfaces of the stone are scratched with spidery lines, palimpsests with several outlined images superimposed on one another. The image-tablets may narrate stories, possibly layered with episodes like strata superimposed over prior parts of the tale. The images are hard to read. The so-called Evenson tablet, discovered in 1930 by a farmer digging a posthole, seems to show a bison, internal organs depicted within the furry outline of the beast, and rays of energy (or, perhaps, trajectories of arrows) emanating into and from its heart. (The tablet, referenced on explanatory signs at the Good Earth State Park, is at Augustana College in Sioux Falls).
By 1714, the village at Blood Run was abandoned. Pressure from the aggressive and wealthy Sioux forced people in the town to leave the site and move south into Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Different language groups that had apparently co-existed at Blood Run fissioned into separate tribal entities. The Sioux didn’t trade. They simply took what they wanted and were inclined to murder you if you protested. And they had guns and horses. In recent years, the term “colonializer” has been applied to European settlers said to have “colonized” Native American territory. But the Seven Council fires of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota were, it seems, the original colonizers in this area, disenfranchising the earlier indigenous people and, in fact, driving them out of their villages.
Memories of the towns on the Big Sioux survived into the 19th century. When Frances La Flesche (Iron Eye), a leader of Omaha-Ponca Indians, wrote with Alice Fletcher his enormous treatise on his people, published in 1911 among the proceedings of the Smithsonian Institute, oral traditions still existed that people had migrated from a “big village” somewhere to the north before becoming the equestrian hunter-nomads who ranged the plains in eastern Nebraska in the 1850's.
6.
The Ponca seem to have had a disproportionate influence on the historiography at Good Earth. Outside the handsome new visitor center with its ski-chalet ambience, a polychrome statue greets pedestrians walking from the parking lots. An American Indian couple with noble features stand together, hip to hip; the woman is clad in deer-skin garment with gentian blue fringes and two red bands decorating her mid-section. The man holds a catlinite pipe that is the color of ox-blood and has the stalk of a white and black feather rising over the back of his skull. On the statue’s plinth, grotesque bas reliefs occupy wheel-shaped medallions painted with silvery highlights. The reliefs on the statue’s base illustrate four Ponca animal fables – the stories are printed in an explanatory brochure and, if the truth be told, are not very compelling: a glutton says that he won’t eat a turtle and, in another story, a coyote assures some turkeys that he’s not all that hungry, but, of course, both animals get devoured; a snake bites Coyote after a colloquy in which the serpent warns the trickster not to walk over him – Coyote dies “curled up like a snake” with his body swollen and “skin tight.” An enterprising rabbit catches the sun, but is badly burned by its rays, an injury that explains the sooty markings on these animals. The images show sinister-looking creatures with mask-like faces and a little figure who looks like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings clawing his way out of dark blue cistern. Apparently, the tales are the intellectual property of the Ponca tribe because the brochure notes that the animal parables are printed with their consent.
The visitor center is spacious with a relief map of the trails on the property. A movie shows on a loop in a small auditorium. There is an airy, bright gallery with a mock-up of an Indian lodge, several life-size mannequins of wolf-like dogs pulling travois, and panels densely inscribed with information about the site’s history. Some pipestone preforms, red rectangular tablets of catlinite are displayed in one of the glass cases with a facsimile of the Evenson artifact. Of course, there are several tiny, elegant-looking arrowheads and small straight-razor scrapers that look so sharp and angular that you wonder how anyone could use a tool of that sort without mutilating himself. The movie shows some Native children with their grandfather seated by a campfire; the stars are bright in the sky. Grandfather tells the children about the old times and the village where the stream tilted its waters into the big river. The grandfather admits that not a lot is known about the village but that there are several pitted boulders, that is, big glacial erratics in which hundreds of fist-shaped depressions are carved. Fire light decorates the cratered surface of one of the boulders. The old man admits that no one knows why the ancients carved the boulder but that it is sacred, wakan like just about everything else in the world. A drone skates over the tree-tops near the river, showing the landscape from the vantage of a dragon fly or hawk. Grandfather, brooding by the fire, has finished his story, words that are, in fact, very vague and indefinite so he tells the kids to go and play, an odd command since it is dark and, apparently, late at night.
Representatives of the Ponca, Omaha, Ioway and Otoe people selected the name for the site, “Good Earth”, by consensus, since, of course, no one knows what the place was called by its inhabitants. These words are spoken differently in the four languages now used by the descendants of the villagers and transliterations of the phrase are presented in various iterations on an explanatory panel near the front door. “Good Earth” signifies a peaceful place where people of different tribes lived in harmony.
7.
I want to see one of the pitted boulders and, so, Angelica and I walk to the river bluffs where there are three overlooks like the redwood decks you might find on the back of an expensive suburban house. The trail is nondescript, crossing some grey and brown tall-grass prairie where grasshoppers squirt out of the weeds along the path as we walk. The river is white with thumbs of sand stuck in the throat of the channel. The Indian village, along Blood Run, is actually outside of the South Dakota park on the grassy terraces on the other side of the Big Sioux River in Iowa. Nothing remains. Insects saw and hiss in the trees clustered along the bluffs and crowded into the ravines dropping to the river. The pitted boulders are, apparently, on the other side of the river in a companion preserve, the Blood Run National Historic Site in Iowa.
At the visitor center, a grey-haired woman volunteer doesn’t seem to know anything about the Indian village. It’s as if she has never ventured into the gallery of the museum thirty paces away where there is an exhibit about the place. A man working on a computer behind her, presumably someone on the payroll, says that there are no signs at the Blood Run site but that it can be reached by gravel roads in Iowa.
8.
Early accounts of the archaeology of the village are dominated by two men. R. F. Pettigrew and his brother, Franklin. In 1888, the two men came to the place from Sioux Falls where they had settled and become prominent citizens. R. F. Pettigrew drew a detailed scale map of the village site, a place that he called “the Silent City.” (An article under this name was published in the newspaper in Sioux Falls and Pettigrew later submitted a report published in the proceedings of the Smithsonian Institute in 1891). R. F. Pettigrew was trained as a surveyor and his map is very neatly drawn to scale. In 1888, plowing (and, later, gravel mining) hadn’t erased the features that he scrupulously recorded in his diagram. Pettigrew inked onto his map 76 stone circles, presumably marking the boundaries of structures. Most of the circles were small but there were two large rings of rock, one 63 feet in diameter and the other over 130 feet in size. A large enclosure between embankments occupied the center of the complex. There were, at least, 60 raised mounds, at that time, two to three high, scattered between rock circles. At least one of the mounds was shaped like some kind of quadruped, although the identity of the beast forming the effigy mound was not obvious to Pettigrew. The brothers reported that pioneers in the area said that there had been a 150 foot long mound in the shape of a serpent but that, when the Burlington, Cedar Rapids, and Northern right-of-way was built, this peculiar earthen embankment was destroyed. And, of course, the brothers noted the presence of the pitted boulders. The map made by the two men appears in enlarged form on one of explanatory panels in the museum; the marks on the parchment are clear and Pettigrew illustrated each mound with small parallel lines painted on the paper with his quill pen.
9.
Blood Run National Historic Site across the Iowa state-line is difficult to find. It’s easy to cross the river a couple miles downstream of the Good Earth Visitor Center. The stream flows between the low wooded bluffs and shows as a glimmer of water in dunes of sand under the bridge. On the Iowa side, you drive uphill to a junction with an asphalt lane called Apple Road. The country is empty except for a couple of agricultural buildings on ridges and some big gouged-out gravel pits. The old railroad right-of-way is abandoned and overgrown with tall, thorny weeds.
Things get a little dicey on 120th Street, a gravel road that runs toward the place where the prairie curls up into small hills along the Big Sioux River. 120th is marked as a dead end and, in fact, the gravel road ends amid someone’s pole barns and steel granaries, a place marked with some intimidating “no trespassing” signs. It’s not obvious how you proceed from this dead end to the historical site. But, on closer inspection, (and it took us several passes to find it), there’s a two rut track that proceeds north parallel to the river faintly visible just before you reach the farm-site. The track is passable, but rough, and, after a mile, ends at fence-line where there is space to park three vehicles and a gate with a sign labeled “Blood Run National Historic Site.” When we reached the place, on a gloomy overcast afternoon, there was a Ford F250 pick up parked at the fence-line. Some geese in a formation shaped like an arrowhead flew overhead, squawking like an ill-greased door-hinge.
A wide trail mowed across the prairie leads to a knoll about a third of a mile from the parking lot. The fields are mottled with sumac and other darker vegetation, possibly marking slightly concave places where buildings were dug into the ground. But this is, by no means, clear. As advised at the Visitor Center on the other side of the river, there are no signs. An aerial image of the site on Angelica’s cellphone marks places where there are mound sites but these are not apparent at ground level.
After about a half mile, the trail dips into a swale bounded by a murky-looking trench in which the Blood Run creek flows. The stream is about four feet wide and crossed by a strange fiberglass contraption, a sort of prefabricated pier and walkway that is moved on wheels. This structure has been pulled into place and anchored by some posts to provide a way to cross the stream. Beyond the creek bed where the water twists around several luggage-sized stones, the trail rises steeply, zigzagging up to another grassy terrace. Near the creek crossing, we met a woman and a young man with his forearms sleeved in green and purple tattoos. The young man was wearing a hooded tee-shirt rolled up to his elbows and inscribed with something about bow-hunting. The woman was a faded blonde with stringy hair and cowboy boots.
We asked them if they had seen the “pitted boulder.”
“Nope,” the man said. “There is nothing back there.” He gestured over his shoulder.
The woman remarked that there were several big stones at the end of the trail and that someone had mowed around them.
“Maybe that’s what you’re looking for,” she said.
We continued along the paw-shaped hill over the river bottoms to the end of the trail. A barbed wire fence slants down the hillside to the flats near the river, a plain that obviously floods seasonally –we could see some scraped areas showing deep black loam. The barbed wire fence cuts across a big boulder with a sloping lichen-colored surface facing toward the north. A smaller boulder stands atop the hill but the larger rock is about 30 feet down the slope with the jagged, corroded wires encroaching upon it.
The big domed stone at the top of the hill shows two or three cup-sized indentations cut into its upper surface. At first, these marks are hard to see because the surface of the stone is uniformly covered with light-green and grey lichens. But if you put your hand on the cold rock, you can easily feel the pits in the granite. The larger boulder with the barbed wire running over its top is much more heavily, and obviously, worked. But, at first, your eyes have to adjust to something like darkness, or, at least, blurriness, exuding from the rock. Once you see the pits, you can’t see anything else, but it takes a moment to grasp the hundreds of marks cratering the top surface of tilted granite. The craters all seem to be about an inch-and-a-half in depth and they are all the same size, three-and-a-half inches in diameter. The slanted facet of the rock is entirely covered with the pits. The vertical sides of the boulder also show some indentations although not as many. It’s unclear why someone would work the rock’s unyielding granite into this cratered surface. Some writers suggest that the Indians lit fires near the pitted boulder and, then, scooped up coals and embers to put in the craters so that the surface of the rock would appear to glow with an eerie light – but this seems fanciful to me, sheer speculation.
I ran my hand over the pits in the boulder. The lichen surface was crusty and dry. A chill came off the stone. It’s odd that the boulder apparently straddles some sort of boundary marked by the rusty barb wire fence. This is a threshold. For some reason that I don’t understand, the craters show far more clearly in photographs than they do in natural light, under the grey lid of the wet skies. A little rain fell flecking the boulder with dark marks.
Everything is hidden here. The Indians called the place xe (pronounced “khay”) – that is Ioway and Otoe for “where something is buried.”
10.
In one of his excellent books on Chaco Canyon, Stephen Lekson describes an archaeological site as revealing “more oddities than a Santa Fe flea market.” I think the same can be said about the Good Earth and Blood Run site.
First, the Oneota who lived in this place were not mound-builders. So why did they go to the effort of building 60 mounds? The Oneota are not associated with effigy mounds, but there is, at least, one confirmed feature of this sort on the site and, of course, reports relating to a large serpent mound scraped up when the railroad right-of-way was built. The ceremonial enclosure at the center of the village is another unique feature, not consistent with any other Oneota sites, and the configuration of the embankments show that the enclosure was entered from the west – this is very peculiar since Oneota and other Native Americans built their structures with east-facing entrances to catch the light of the rising sun. (An entrance from the west would be inauspicious – the west was where the sun went to die.) Finally, three geoglyphs have been found in the area of the village, two of them on the Iowa side near Blood Run, but one uncovered when the foundations for the original Visitor Center (the site had to be moved) were excavated. Some pictures show a network of little orange flags marking the lines and intersections unearthed in the South Dakota geoglyph. The markings in the soil show a complex network of irregular lines criss-crossing one another – the labyrinth of marks suggests some sort of map, scrawled on a tract of land about sixty feet by sixty. But no one has any idea what the glyph is supposed to represent and, if it’s a map, the marks don’t correlate well with any local landmarks.
None of these features have been convincingly explained. Of course, it’s possible that the serpent mound (if it really existed) was much more ancient and drew people to this place. But no other mounds of this sort have been discovered anywhere near Blood Run. (The famous and mysterious serpent mound in Ohio is a thousand miles away and was made a thousand years earlier than the village at Blood Run.)
11.
The Minnehaha County Old Courthouse Museum is a massive Romanesque pile of rough red ashlar with a tower that is like the finger of God pointing into the heavens. The old Courthouse was designed by a man named Wallace Dow and its an impressively gloomy and vast edifice. Sioux Falls is built on several shelves above the Big Sioux River and its notable cascades. The lowest shelf or terrace is located along the river, about twelve feet above the labyrinth of falling water. The second shelf, a step higher is where the town was first located, rising over the wood shells and towers of the mills built into the Big Sioux. The Old County Courthouse dominates this part of the town. At the highest point above the river, the twin towers of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church adorn the skyline.
The Old Courthouse is a pile of rough-hewn Sioux Quartzite blocks. From this point forth, my essay concerns Sioux Quartzite, an ubiquitous stone in this part of the world. I should write an ode to this rock, but, of course, my powers fail me – so this text, now, turns a stony prose countenance to its readers. Words metamorphize into crystal and, then, cross-bedded boulders. Something hard, petrified, impenetrable is exposed, an outcrop utterly resistant to any sort of erosion. Red boulders ripped from their matrix of living rock – the stratum of Sioux Quartzite where Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota intersect is said to be 3000 meters thick – are now my theme.
So you must know these things: Sioux Quartzite is also called Proterozoic Quartzite. The rock is metamorphic, the product of great pressure applied to beds of silicaceous sandstone, quartz-bearing sands deposited by vast braided rivers that flowed across the barrens of our empty planet 2280 mya. (“MYA” means “million years ago” – so 2280 mya equals one-million years multiplied by 2280.) During the proterozoic era, the earth’s atmosphere became oxygenated – this is said to account for the red hematite or iron rust color in the sandstone particles. The sedimentary layers of vermillion sandstone were buried and subjected to enormous pressures resulting in the formation of the quartzite rock. The rock’s alluvial origins are evident in slabs of the stone that show obvious ripple patterns, relics of the currents in the ancient rivers sculpting sand deposits. Five-hundred thousand years ago, glaciers gouged open the earth in southwestern Minnesota and its adjacent states, exposing the quartzite beds. The rock is extremely hard, said to be the second hardest building material in existence. Hardness is measured on the so-called Mohs scale – diamond, the hardest naturally occuring mineral, is ranked at 10; talc, which can be cut with a fingernail, is one. Gemstones and granite rank 8 on the scale. Sioux Quartzite has a Mohs-hardness of seven. Therefore, the stone is impervious to erosion. For this reason, the waterfalls on the Big Sioux cascade over enduring pinnacles and slabs of red Sioux Quartzite.
After the world has ended and the post-nuclear glaciers been burned away by the radiation of our exploding sun, I surmise that the Minnehaha County Courthouse in Sioux Falls will still be standing, a rust-red shell of perdurable stone. Perhaps, it’s formidable steeple will have fallen to rest on its side next to the cavernous ruins, an escarpment of hewn rock crouching like a tarantula in the wasteland.
12.
The interior of the Courthouse is dim with gloomy corridors centered around a grandiose stairway. Some peculiar diaphanous murals, now much faded, decorate the walls, scarcely visible except where embrasures in the fortified Sioux quartzite walls admits some light.
The museum’s collections are well worth seeing, an idiosyncratic assembly of curiosities. South Dakota is conservative and the museum doesn’t really promote any political agenda – unlike, for instance, the deplorable virtue-signaling that characterizes Minnesota museums, and, particularly, exhibits at the Minnesota Historical Society. Three stories of courthouses are open to the public; the tower, said to enclose a gothic and Piranesi-like set of iron stairs and ladders, of course, is off-limits. The clock atop the tower still functions; presumably, colonies of bats are the only creatures that persistently occupy the place. A big courtroom, without any ostentatious decoration, takes up most of the second floor – there’s a utilitarian-looking chandelier that can be raised and lowered an metal cable above the court premises. When Angelica and I were in the structure, the courtroom, cleared now of its judicial bench, jury box, and pews, was set up for a banquet – round tables with spotless white table cloths were arranged around the spacious room, so that the place had a certain expectant atmosphere. In the corner of the former courtroom, an oak dock, elevated about three short steps above the floor and surrounded by a wooden balustrade, has been pushed into a corner. During trials, the accused stood in the dock, exposed the scrutiny of people in the pews and spectators gathered on the balcony above. On the third floor, the interior corridor opens onto the balcony where there is a wrought iron railing, a perspective down onto the courtroom below, and a good view of the mechanism controlling the chandelier. At various places in the courthouse, small, elegant tile hearths open into the rooms. The hearths are lined with amber-colored slabs and have a faintly gem-like aspect – in the old days, coal was burned in those hearths resulting, of course, in soot and, even, more gloom in the building.
13.
The museum’s curatorial rationale seems to be to collect and display stuff that people might want to see. This is pretty straight-forward but seems to be a philosophy that eludes many museum directors. Some galleries show items of local interest – there’s a couple of rooms (in the old law library) displaying artifacts and photographs associated with World War Two camp where military radio-men were trained; another exhibit space shows items associated with the Dakota (or Sioux) Indians who once ranged through this area. A traveling exhibition, I think, presents relics associated with women’s cosmetics and hair-styling. The most interesting show was a exhibit called “100 Artifacts”, items selected from the museum’s collection by the historical societies staff.
“100 Artifacts” is a miscellany presenting curious objects arranged in roughly chronological order (although with conspicuous deviations) without any thematic organization. It’s the kind of exhibit that bears marks of the passion that underlies all collecting – that is, assembling rare and strange relics for the delectation of those privileged to see these things. The show also shows hallmarks of the historical society’s founder, R. F. Pettigrew, the same man who made the precise and calligraphically elegant survey of the “silent city” at Blood Run. Pettigrew was an amateur archaeologists, an “antiquarian” as it was once called, by avocation. He was an inveterate collector and things that he acquired form the heart of the museum’s exhibits. His fingerprints, as it were, are on many of the objects displayed in the museum.
Pettigrew served as South Dakota’s first senator in Congress representing the State from 1889 to 1901. He opposed American annexation of Hawaii, observing that the stars and stripes would be raised over the islands only in “infamy”. (He also vigorously opposed American military adventures in the Philippines, Cuba, and elsewhere.) Queen Lil’uokalini recognized Pettigrew’s support for Hawaiian independence by giving him an elaborately carved cane. Pettigrew was an avid cane collector and “100 Artifacts” displays the Queen’s cane as well as another half-dozen of these objects, all elegantly slender, even rapier-like with ornamented grips. Pettigrew was a world traveler and, when he was in China in 1901, he purchased a number of souvenirs there, including an intricately carved shrine – the curator responsible for this artifact’s presence in the show, astutely compares the complicated carving of interwoven alcoves and filigree frames to some of Louise Nevelson’s art works; it’s an interesting allusion which deepens the appeal of the elaborate wooden altar.
In the late 19th century, antiquarians acquired and displayed historical documents. Pettigrew owned a copy of the 1815 Treaty of Friendship made between the Sioux and the United States. The Sioux were allied with the British during the War of 1812, but, after the Crown was defeated, had to mend bridges with the Americans – hence the treaty. The document is one of the various scrivener’s copies made of the treaty, neatly written in a large, legible law-hand with capitals that swoop and flutter like exotic butterflies. The names of the Indian signatories are written in hyphenated syllables, each marked with an “x” behind the letters to show that the person identified executed the document. A voter’s registry for the State, once displayed at the Columbian exposition in 1893, rests like a small howitzer or a big oak wine cask on a pedestal. The book is vast bound in leather dense as petrified wood and it has thick ribs fortifying its spine. A photograph shows two sylph-like Victorian ladies, swooning, it seems, at the sides of the massive volume. Nearby, a case shows bezoars (hairballs) extracted from the guts of cows and horses – the things are polished grey and the size of billiard balls. One of these belly-stones has been sawed open to reveal concentric rings around its dense, meteorite-like core. Suspended over the entrance to the gallery is a white suit cradling a mannequin with arms and legs extended in free fall. This is a bat-wing suit worn by wing-walkers and sky-divers in early air shows. The suit’s arms and legs are webbed and the figure’s head half concealed behind goggles is covered with a sinister-looking hood.
A beautifully painted portrait shows a dignified old gentleman wearing a square white apron. The apron is as bright as a cloud like by the rays of the sun, a bank of bright fresh snow around the man’s hips. A few years ago, the portrait was found in an upper floor storage space at the Freemason’s fraternal Lodge in town. The portrait, turned to the wall, had been forgotten for many years and was covered with dust. But it was intact and marked with some writing indicating that the man was someone called “George Pettigrew”, the lodge’s Master Mason. How was George Pettigrew related to R. F. Pettigrew? We know that the State Senator had a brother called Franklin, said to have died in an accident when he was relatively young. R. F. Pettigrew’s sister, Belle, was prominent in Sioux Falls; she had been an ardent abolitionist at the time of the Civil War when she lived in the family’s ancestral home in Vermont – she was ten years older that her brother R. F. Belle served as a Baptist missionary to the Dakotas and traveled with her brother during his world tour in 1901 and the following years. (There is a photograph of the formidable looking woman with a parasol over her handsome, implacable features; the picture was taken in Tokyo and she is wearing a tight, form-fitting bodice undoubtedly fashioned from whale-bone or steel stays.) But it’s unclear how, or, even, if George Pettigrew, the Master Mason, was related to this family. The painting is dark, with Rembrandt inflections, certainly the work of an accomplished artist, and the elderly gentleman looks like old Major Amberson in Orson Welle’s film. His white whiskers and sideburns rhyme with the immaculate square panel of bright white paint, his apron, covering his belly.
14.
Of course, no museum in South Dakota is complete without an exhibit featuring Native American objects. Many of these things in Old County Museum are also objects collected by R. F. Pettigrew. A diorama shows an Indian youth wrestling with an eagle and a label tells us that hawks were captured, their pinions cut, and, then, raised for feathers. The lexicon of feathers displayed by Sioux warriors is itemized: an upright feather dyed red = wounded in combat (it’s like a Purple Heart medal); a split feather is even more emphatic – it means wounded many times in combat; one upright feather = first coup; a feather with notches = slit enemy’s throat and scalped him. Ponies used in raids were similarly marked: each red hand print impressed into the animal’s fur signified an enemy killed in battle; vertical hatchmarks numbered times the warrior had counted coup on an enemy; a hoofprint signified a horse stolen in a raid. Sioux warriors painted circles around their pony’s eyes to strengthen their vision and thunderbolts marked the horse’s flanks and gaskins, adornments signifying power and speed. A Lower Brule Sioux woman named Hail Road owned a dress with an elaborate dentalium collar, shell from the Pacific northwest worked into eleven rows of glistening ivory decoration. The fringes of her dress were threaded with silver bells and Hail Road wore at her throat a turtle-shell necklace with pendant Bison dew claws.
The Sioux were wealthy. The average Indian family owned between 8 and 10 war ponies. War made them rich and their chieftains and war-leaders were like figures from the Iliad.
15.
By contrast with highly competent portrait artist who depicted George Pettigrew, the commissioners for Minnehaha County contracted with a notably inept painter, Ole Running, for the dozen or so large murals in the building. Running was a Norwegian immigrant and he adorned the walls of the grand stairway and panels in the upper hallways with vaporous landscapes. Running seems to have been an inadvertent Impressionist – his gauzy, blurred paintings are hazy and indistinct, but, I think, as a result of the artist’s inability to depict things in perspective or with any semblance to reality. Running spent two years making these landscapes, images that are mostly devoid of any signs of human activity (one mural shows some schematic log cabins), but dotted, here and there, with the grey silhouettes of elk and bison. The animal figures are small and drowned in the bluish-green murk that characterizes Running’s pallette. Several of the pictures show clusters of Sioux Quartzite columns and there’s an image of palisades at Dell Rapids a few miles north of Sioux Falls. Wispy trees with faint foliage stand next to falling water. Running has no idea how to depict the waterfalls and rapids that he portrays – any mural made in Sioux Falls must, of course, reference the famous cascades over the slabs and blocks of quartzite in the river bed a quarter mile from the Courthouse. He seems to have been influenced by long exposure photographs; the cascades and falls that he paints are bluish-veined travertine, wholly devoid of any sense of motion – the water in his pictures seems to be frozen. In some of the pictures, bison and deer march in single-file through what appears to be a blizzard – but it’s not clear to me that the effect is intentional; perhaps, the atmospheric disorder is just ineptitude in Running’s application of paint. Or, it may be that the picture’s have just faded with time and been poorly conserved although I doubt that this is the case. Viewed in a certain light, there’s a weirdly poetic aspect to Running’s murals – they are all suggestion and inference with nothing directly shown except columnar rock and cliffs depicted from peculiar vantages that don’t make any sense, the animals dim and melting as if the air itself were dissolving them. (Inexplicably, on a second floor wall, Running painted a small figure contemplating a remote rock formation – it’s an image of one of Running’s cronies gazing up at the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire; why he chose to put this picture on a wall in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is unclear.) Running’s work is the visual equivalent of Debussy but not as an intentional program, but, instead, by sheer mishap. Minnehaha County paid Running $500 for his work; he seems to have lost interest during the painting of these murals and they were completed, with equal incompetence, by Running’s son, Elmer. Running himself went west, moving about every six months for years before ending up at the bottom of the funnel, that is, in southern California. He died in 1951.
16.
A town lives in a place for a particular reason. Human habitations aren’t randomly distributed across the landscape. In southern Minnesota, and for that matter Iowa and the east part of South Dakota, cities were built near sources of energy, generally at places where the slow-moving and listless rivers in this flat terrain were stirred to action by waterfalls or cascades. Minneapolis, a milling city, is at St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi; Austin, also originally a mill town, was settled where the Cedar River drops twenty feet in a course of rapids (now long eradicated by a several low-head dams impounding the mill-pond). Away from moving water, villages were built at predictable intervals at either intersections or places where trains stopped – that is, a village is separated from its neighboring towns by the distance that a man can comfortably walk or travel by wagon in a couple hours: in the 19th century, people would travel a half day to their destination, transact business there, and, then, return home by nightfall. In all cases, pioneer towns were built at sources of energy – either busy intersections on roads, train sidings, or flowing water.
Sioux Falls, of course, was settled at the place that the Big Sioux River encounters dikes of pink quartzite rock and topples about thirty-five feet over those ledges to continue on its southward course. (The river is tributary to the Missouri with its confluence at Sioux City, Iowa.) A large park has replaced the crumbling industrial infrastructure that once surrounded the falls. I assume the park has existed for, at least, fifty years – indeed, probably since the fire that destroyed the ruins of the Queen Bee Mill looming over the falls, a blaze that occurred in 1956. As a young lawyer, I had business in Sioux Falls periodically but wasn’t aware of the Falls Park; in those days, the downtown area was blighted and eerily empty and, after taking depositions, I didn’t venture into the city center where the park is located. About twenty-five years ago, I found myself in Sioux Falls on a family vacation and, then, discovered the park at the falls. Some kind of festival was underway and it was pleasantly warm and the falls, it seemed to me, made a web of bright falling water among the stacks of red rock; on the lawns there were vendors and jazz was playing in the distance in some pavilion near the cascades and half-naked teenagers were wading and splashing in the plunge-pools below the mild jets of water, more like domesticated fountains than wild waterfalls. It was a soft, mild day with soft, mild skies slowly infused by the purple of the oncoming night and I thought that the place had a strange, unreal beauty – even the rocks looked soft and mild, like pink pillows.
The Big Sioux River, although shallow is wide, and the water gropes through the pillars and slabs of the big red outcropping, finding its way downward across the low, vermillion escarpment in many separate channels. At least the upper falls is a maze of cascading water, slipping through crevasses and fissures in the rock terraces, a chaos of flattened, squashed-looking stone bright with pinwheels and bursts of water. The channels merge together in rock-girt lagoons just above the second falls where the river gathers to plunge over twenty-foot high rock palisades in a forceful stream divided into two widely separated cascades. Once there was a lower falls about a hundred yards downstream but the cliffs in the stream-bed were dynamited so that a company dedicated to polishing the Sioux Quartzite for building facades and tombstones could use water diverted through spillways to run its machines. The ghost of the demolished lower falls seems to hover in the air over a sullen-looking bend in the channel full of dispirited stagnant water.
When I first saw the park, there was something surreal about it. This impression arises from the fact that there are slanting green lawns, lush and well-watered as on a golf course, that flank the red rock gorge and, amidst these manicured fairways, the grass sometimes gives way to sixty or seventy-foot ovals of liver-colored Sioux Quartzite. The Quartzite is cross-bedded which means that it fractures at right angles and, therefore, the exposed outcroppings look unnatural, like heaps of irregularly cut stone once comprising, it seems, the foundations for cyclopean structures now vanished. The grass laps up around these islands of cubical rock, cut into small pillars and pedestals and columnar formations like square pipe organs. Great expanses of smooth-looking stone flank the falls, also resembling manmade floors and staircases of quartzite. Presumably, when the falls are in full-spate, in April, perhaps, sheets of falling water cover the entire face of the stone, but, most of the year, the river is mild and well-mannered and the cascades are confined to the center of the rock formations. The sense that the falls are comprised, at least, partially of man-made ruins is enhanced by the fact that, indeed, there are wrecked buildings all around the cascades, the remains of human industry that was attempted here but failed or became obsolete. A turbine house stands on a pier of battered concrete on the lip of the falls and there are ruins of the Queen Bee Mill, stacks of old bricks formed into arches and empty windows next to the stream. To the east of the falls, informational signs explain that there was, in fact, an active quarry once, breaking up the quartzite, to ship it east for use in public buildings. Dakota Territory, before the state existed, sent its felons to a prison in Detroit. But someone had the bright idea of using convicts to quarry rock next to the cascades and, although I couldn’t discern much trace of this activity today, knee-high ramparts of Sioux quartzite mark the edges of the pit. To the south of the cascades, at the site of the dynamited lower falls, a viewing tower overlooks the zone of waterfalls and there’s a nicely appointed café that serves brunch in the summer. People were walking dogs and jogging on well-maintained paths winding through the reefs of chopped and stacked rock, formations of stone that look like something from a Max Ernst painting and the whole place has a dreamy, brooding ambience.
These falls were too unpredictable for industry and, ultimately, every attempt to harness their force was unsuccessful. The Queen Bee Mill was one of the first roller mills in the Midwest – prior to its erection in 1881 grain was ground under stone millstones with the effect that people’s oat meal was gritty with flecks of rock. Roller Mills were steel and had the advantage of not contaminating flour and meal with foreign materials. At Queen Bee, big millstones harried the grain into smaller particles that were then processed to varying degrees of fine texture by the steel roller mills. The structure was a marvel of Victorian engineering with seven floors connected by conveyors and lifts, but the river was either a turbulent chaos of falling water (for a few weeks) or mostly dry – so the water power wasn’t consistent and the mill failed within two years of its completion. New investors came and the Queen Bee’s technology was adjusted but the place never made a profit and its stood empty for fifty years or more before fire took it down.
The Drake Stone Cutting and Polishing Company located at the Lower Falls also failed within a decade, although for a different reason. The escarpment over which the river fell was an unruly mass of fractured and tilted stone, some of it polished by the water into turtle-shell humps, and the Big Sioux was unreliable – hence, the demolition of the Lower Falls in 1883 to tame the river into a system of rational spillways to run Drake’s machines. (James Drake, a civil war veteran, himself lived in St. Paul and operated granite quarries in St. Cloud as well.) The company employed highly skilled artisans and gradually developed into a leading vendor of polished petrified wood, much of it retailed in New York at Tiffany’s. There is no petrified wood in the immediate area – I think there are some stone trees lying in the gravel out in the Badlands, but that area was full of wild and hostile Indians in the 1880's. (The Sioux weren’t finally defeated until the fight at Wounded Knee Creek on the edge of those Badlands in January of 1891.) Drake went to Prescott, Arizona, negotiated a concession with the Federal Government and, then, extracted petrified wood in bulk from the Painted Desert area in northeast Arizona. The gemstone was brought to Sioux Falls and fashioned at the Stone Cutting and Polishing Company. But the petrified wood was a Federal resource and there was concern about Drake denuding the famous gem-forest and in 1906 his concession was canceled. Without a reliable source of petrified wood, Drake’s business lost its business with Tiffany’s as well as with building contractors specializing in upscale mansions and, so, the enterprise failed. R. F. Pettigrew, who peeps out of every nook and cranny of this essay, capitalized on Drake’s failure; he bought the remaining petrified wood at discount from the polishing company’s warehouses next to the river and used it to adorn the new museum addition to his residence just up the hill from the falls. (Pettigrew maintained his office at the Cataract House, an elegant hotel in downtown Sioux Falls – that place survived until 1973 when it was razed to make way for a Wells Fargo Bank; by this point, the economy of Sioux Falls was making a transition to servicing credit card accounts, one of the city’s major industries today).
James Drake who owned the Drake Stone Polishing Company applied for his Civil War pension after the government cut him off from his supplies of petrified wood. He died in 1912 in Chicago.
17.
Photographs taken in the 1880's, the decade when trains brought settlers by the thousands to eastern South Dakota, show the town as a cheerless collection of brick and timber-frame buildings posing against a bleak, empty and treeless prairie. Today, of course, Sioux Falls is pleasantly wooded, with leafy residential lanes and groves of trees on the knolls over the cascades. At the highest point in town, on river’s west side, St. Joseph Cathedral dominates the skyline. Unlike most of the city’s other architecture, the church is built of pale, watery-looking stone, not the ubiquitous quartzite. The structure shines in the sunlight, a gleaming facade with spiky towers somehow disproportionately sized They seem either too tall and skinny or not tall enough. (By contrast with the church’s chalk-colored stone, red Sioux quartzite seems to absorb light and creates a kind of shadowy darkness wherever it is used.)
The stone steps rising to the church’s front door afford a fine view of the city. Inside, the place is dim at first, but, then, some helpful, and unseen, maintenance worker or clergyman flips on the lights so that we can see better. A stately row of pillars lines the sanctuary. These massive columns are pale green with nebulous pinkish highlights. In the dome over the altar, there is a nativity scene depicted with particular emphasis on the domestic farm animals in the stable. The top of the manger has been peeled away to reveal a glowing cream-colored void inhabited by some brightly appareled angels and saints. There’s a baldachin upheld by four monumental jade-colored pillars. The shelter over the altar is capped with a sort of round bowler hat, a cupola made from some kind of gilded metal.
Two Sudanese men, apparently enemies, occupy the second pew from the front. Each is seated at the extreme end of his pew, that is, as far from his compatriot as possible. The men have plastic shopping sacks on their laps and display the moon-face characteristic of well-fed Sudanese – they have billowy full cheeks, apple cheeks one might say. Around the edges of the sanctuary there are the Stations of Cross in which the gory scenes are portrayed in three-quarter relief, polychrome terra-cotta, I reckon. These are elaborate tableaux: each has nine to 16 figures radiating like spokes around the center comprised by the suffering Man of Sorrows. The floor is pietra dura, a dignified pattern of egg-shaped black marble inset in polished white and green surfaces. It’s all curvilinear so that there are no right-angle joints in the pattern. It’s said that anti-religious freemasons designed their lodges with tile floors arranged in rectilinear patterns – in that way, no one could walk without trampling upon a cross. The pattern in the Sioux Falls church avoids this sort of blasphemy.
Sometimes, Angelica and I can hear the faint sound of a choir practicing. High voices echo off the marble walls and columns. But the parking lot was empty and the choir is invisible.
18.
In the preceding section, I said that the prairie on which Sioux Falls was built is shown in early photographs as bleak and empty. I’m not sure that this is fair characterization. In fact, the prairie is either vibrantly green, an emerald carpet stretching to the horizon, or burned to a crisp gold color – and in either case the tall grass prairie is veined and studded with wild flowers. The high plains look bleak because old photographs show them in black and white and the fields of grass appear as grey voids in the pictures.
19.
The Church of St. Joseph is on North Duluth Street in Sioux Falls. As it happens, R. F. Pettigrew’s house is only three or four blocks away and so we decide to visit the museum in that place.
The State Senator’s house is surprisingly modest. It’s not the most imposing building on its street, let alone in the town. Other larger and more grandiose residences, with towers and stained glass windows next to vast porches with filigree trim framing two-buggy porte cocheres line the broad street. By contrast, Pettigrew’s place is a rather dark-looking edifice, walls of red brick balanced on a massive plinth of raw-looking Sioux Quartzite. The residence is fairly small, probably about eight rooms packed around a nondescript if spacious stair. You enter the building through an annex that houses exhibits about the Senator and some parts of collection of curiosities – Pettigrew added the annex to the house in 1925, the year before he died, to display his artifacts and geological specimens; the annex facade is made from colorful striated petrified wood, apparently the stone that he bought from the Travis Polishing Company when it failed. Pettigrew wanted the public to enjoy his collection of antiquities and the souvenirs he acquired abroad when he circumnavigated the world with his sister and wife in 1903 but he died before the museum actually opened in 1926.
Inside the house, there are exhibits about Pettigrew, although curiously neutral and, even, denatured it seemed to me, and some displays about the previous owners of the house. The structure was built in 1889 by a prominent local lawyer. Pettigrew didn’t acquire the dwelling until twenty-two years later in 1911. A tour is forming in the museum foyer and, so, we follow a young woman through the house. It’s just Angelica and myself together with two chubby women who seem to be sisters. The women are interested in the drapes and furniture and repeatedly ask if the couches and wallpaper are original. Of course, this begs the question of original to whom? That is, original to the lawyer who built the place or to his successor in the house or to Pettigrew? This leads to some rather Talmudic splitting of hairs. One room is lined with damask wallpaper installed by Pettigrew to replace leather that previously covered the walls. The sisters are puzzled. The leather samples shown on a small table in the room (you can touch them) look nothing like the silky damask pattern on the walls and they can’t figure out how animal hide somehow metamorphosed into the velvet patterns in the paper. Somehow, the confusion proliferates and pretty soon, no one can understand what anyone else is saying. It’s as if the shadows in the house have entered people’s brains to darken and disorient them.
Of course, the upstairs toilet conveniently located between the master bedroom and room where Pettigrew’s wife slept is a highlight. The tub is huge and sepulchral, a white cast-iron tomb. Pettigrew was said to be very tall. In the parlor downstairs, the place where visitors conversed with the family and where, according to the customs of the time, the dead were laid out for visitation, there are four impressive paintings flanking the hearth. (The house was designed by the architect Wallace Dow who planned the Courthouse and the fireplaces are like those in the museum a few blocks away, tawny amber tiles where coal was burned – Pettigrew didn’t like the soot and so installed gas heating and lighting in chandeliers with dual function; if the electricity, which was somewhat primitive failed, you could burn gas overhead.) Two of the portraits show Pettigrew and his brother, Franklin. It is said that Franklin Pettigrew died young in a horse-and-buggy hit-and-run – at least, that’s how the girl leading the tour characterizes the event. The girl says that the other two portraits show unknown local businessmen. This seems blatantly incorrect to me. One of the canvases portrays the dignified head of old Major Amberson from The Magnificent Ambersons – that is, the noble old freemason in the portrait at the Minnehaha County Old Courthouse Museum. I’m surprised that the girl doesn’t make this connection.
If you are my age, the house may remind you of the place where your elderly grandma lived, a dark collection of rooms with old books on the shelves and ancient lamps next to overstuffed chairs. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the structure. The girl says that the house is built in Queen Anne style, that is, “carpenter’s gothic” as it is sometimes termed and none of the rooms are the same size – rather rooms of different dimensions are fitted into the layout of the dwelling like pieces in jigsaw puzzle.
The tour ends in a rather dingy closet where there are floor-to-ceiling cases of artifacts that Pettigrew acquired in trade with the Smithsonian Institute. After the failure of the Travis Stone Polishing company, Pettigrew became the local mogul in petrified wood. The Smithsonian wanted samples of the fossil wood and, so, Pettigrew agreed to send them specimens if they would provide to him, on permanent loan, artifacts from their collection. On the evidence of the carefully labeled relics in the glass cases, Pettigrew got the worst of the trade – the Smithsonian artifacts are nondescript grey chunks of stone, girdled with incised troughs, or vaguely cylindrical mallet heads; these things are not only ugly but look like dark potatoes, rejects with numerical yellow labels with a vaguely sulky demeanor. The girl doesn’t know the provenance of the inert and heavy-looking hand tools in the cases. The room is small and grim and it’s a relief to exit into the well-lit museum. On the wall in the museum, there is displayed a mount of a bison - cow hybrid, another Indian treaty in handwritten facsimile, and pictures of the neat surveyor’s diagram that Pettigrew inked of the “silent city” at Blood Run. No one has said a word about Pettigrew’s tenure as a Senator in Washington.
On the staircase leading down to the exit from the museum, there’s elaborately printed handbill written in German:
Sued Dakota – reichstes Kornkammer der Welt
Ein Land voll Sonnenschein, gesundes Klima, glueckliche Menschen – seine fruchtbare Felder, bluehende Staedte, und wachsenden Industrie laden euch ein and bieten euch goldene Gelegenheiten zur Existenz.
That is:
South Dakota – the richest granary in the World
A land full of sunshine, healthy climate, happy people – its fertile fields, blossoming cities, and growing industries invite and offer you golden opportunities for your existence.
The handbill was printed in Pierre, South Dakota by the Staatsbureau fuer Einwanderung.
20.
The tour of Pettigrew’s house was less than useless. This was unfortunate because everything about the man is fascinating. R. F. Pettigrew was a controversial figure in his lifetime and, indeed, for sixty years thereafter. It took Sioux Falls a lifetime to get over him.
After his death, Pettigrew’s radical populist politics were out of fashion. The County closed the museum before it even properly opened. The house was used as the residence for the curator of the Old Courthouse museum and, indeed, three generations of museum directors lived in the place. To make room for their families, the curators stripped the shelves of Pettigrew’s relics and moved them into the third-floor attic along with the former senator’s voluminous files, correspondence, and personal papers. Some of these materials were sorted and indexed during the Depression under the Federal Writer’s Project but, by and large, Pettigrew’s papers were simply ignored. A fire ignited in the attic in the late thirties but it was quickly extinguished without much damage – a few books stored in the attic were said to have been scorched.
Politics in the late sixties revived interest in Pettigrew and his correspondence and other papers were extracted from the unheated attic, dusted-off, and, finally, indexed in 1974 and put on micro-fiche at Augustana College (the college is on a tract of land associated with Pettigrew’s enterprises that he donated to the school).
Pettigrew was just young enough to miss the Civil War – the conflict began when he was 12. Of course, his family was intensely interested in the war; his father was a prominent abolitionist, operated a Vermont way-station on the Underground Railway, and was friends with William Lloyd Garrison. When he was twenty, Pettigrew went west with a government surveying team dispatched to map what is now South Dakota. (Pettigrew was trained as a surveyor). The team’s base of operations was Fort Dakota, a military post established in the wake of the Sioux Wars in 1862 - 1864. The Indians had retreated across the Missouri when Pettigrew came to the area and, so, the army post built near the Falls was scheduled for abandonment. Pettigrew took advantage of the situation and bought 160 acres previously part of Fort Dakota. He, then, set about attracting businesses to the area, coaxing four separate railroad lines to stop by the falls and establishing other enterprises. At this time in his life, Pettigrew, a Lincoln Republican, was a staunch capitalist.
Pettigrew attracted investors in stockyards and slaughterhouse, once the bedrock (before credit cards) of Sioux Falls economy. In the matter of times, Pettigrew’s packing plant just discharged its waste water and other effluent into the Big Sioux River befouling the silvery cascades dancing down the Sioux quartzite ledges. He ran for office and was involved in all sorts of chicanery. He bribed election officials to keep opponents off the ballots and engaged in other dirty tricks and political skullduggery. He was elected as the State’s first senator to Washington in 1888. National politics in the so-called Gilded Age disgusted him and he migrated precipitously to the Progressive and Liberal Causes. He joined the Anti-Imperialist League and opposed American military adventures in Cuba and the Philippines. As noted before, he was a vehement opponent of the American annexation of the Hawaiian Islands.
In 1896, Pettigrew bolted from the traditional Republican party and announced that he was a “Silver Republican”, or “bimetallist”. He lost his senatorial seat to the machinations of the McKinley-Hanna machine and abandoned politics for a couple of years while traveling around the world. This was after he had thrown his support to William Jennings Bryan in 1901. By the time that he returned to Sioux Falls, he had become a fully fledged Socialist, even, perhaps, a Communist. In his essays and opinion pieces published in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, long passages of his prose seem to quote (without attribution) Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. He railed against the railroads and the monopolies and said that there would be no freedom in America until the workers “controlled the means of production for equal benefit of all.” He wrote several books about politics including one called Triumphant Plutocracy. (Another of his screeds is a denunciation of political affairs in the Capitol, Imperial Washington.)
Needless to say, Pettigrew aggressively opposed America’s entry into World War One. He openly advocated for civil disobedience, supported Eugene Debs, and, notoriously, urged young men to not enlist in the military. Woodrow Wilson, who despised Pettigrew, influenced the Justice Department to indict him for treason. Pettigrew retained Clarence Darrow as his defense lawyer and, after various shady maneuvers, the indictment was quashed.
Although I didn’t know to look for this artifact, Pettigrew had his federal indictment framed and displayed it in his museum next to facsimile copy of the Declaration of Independence.
In Triumphant Plutocracy, Pettigrew wrote:
“Capital is stolen labor and its function is to steal more land and wealth...Workers of the world (must) take from their exploiters the right to control and direct the economic affairs of the community...The Russian Revolution is the greatest event of our times...”
A prophet is often without honor in his own country. For sixty years, R. F. Pettigrew was ignored in the city that he founded. There is now a ten-foot statue of him downtown and an elementary school has been named in his honor. In 1920, Pettigrew engaged in a campaign to establish a public park at the Falls. He was derided for this effort and, instead, the city encouraged more commercial development in the area, all of it doomed to failure because of the intermittent droughts affecting the volume of water falling through the various turbines and spillways built in the area. On the plinth of Pettigrew’s statue, the sculptor has scrawled in handwriting: “I told you so.” I think this may also be a rebuke to the State and its people for the conspicuously right-wing politics that now reigns in South Dakota.
A big pale boulder sits in front of Pettigrew’s house. No one told me to look closely at the rock and so I ignored it (like the framed indictment) during my visit. I now know that it’s engraved with petroglyphs, mostly in the form of handprints pecked into the quartzite. I’m telling you now that, when you go to the Pettigrew house, you should inspect the boulder for these markings.
21.
So are there giants in Sioux Falls? No doubt Pettigrew dug open some of the mounds at Blood Run in the hope of finding the skeletal remains of colossal men. But he doesn’t seem to have found anything much in those mounds. Pettigrew himself is grown to ten feet and towers over the intersection at Fifth and Philips downtown, a bronze giant statue erected in 1990 and standing next to the busy sidewalk and street.
In the south part of town, on a commercial strip on Minnesota Avenue, a giant stands in front of a brake and exhaust-pipe company. The figure is about 20 feet tall and dressed in blue jeans and a cowboy hat. He cradles in his mighty arms an automobile muffler. This giant is one of the so-called “Muffler Men,” an artifact of roadside advertising from the late sixties. These figures were produced by the hundreds, if not thousands, by International Fiberglass in Venice, California. As it happened, this fiberglass fabricating firm acquired molds from a company called Prewitt Fiberglass Animals. Among the molds was one shaped to make a cyclopean Paul Bunyan complete with a menacing six-foot ax. (The Paul Bunyan figure was originally installed in Flagstaff, Arizona). International Fiberglass, recognizing the appeal of the giants, began to make them in various forms, providing different arm configurations so that the colossal figures could display on their outstretched hands not only mufflers, but roast chickens, birthday cakes, sledgehammers and saws and all other manner of trade goods. (By 1970, the company was fabricating female giants that could appear either in a form-fitting bikini or a demure dress.) By the mid-seventies, the fad had played-out. No one wanted the giants anymore and most of them were either destroyed or warehoused or radically repurposed – for instance, in Battle Lake, Minnesota where the Sioux and Ojibway famously fought, visitors are greeted by the twenty-foot tall Chief Wenonga in full headdress and regalia. International Fiberglass ceased operations in 1976 and destroyed all of its molds. The giant in Sioux Falls is called Mr. Bendo and he’s an important artifact, one of the first muffler giants and still advertising automotive products. Mr. Bendo was enormously powerful and could bend stainless steel tubes with his bare hands to create elaborate and sinuous exhaust pipes. You can see him at Automotive Brake and Exhaust at 2516 S. Minnesota Ave. in Sioux Falls.
22.
We took the freeway out of Sioux Falls and drove to the Minnesota border, exiting at the first road beyond the state line, that is, Exit 1, Highway 23. The roads were wet but patches of blue broke through the cloud in the west. Halfway between the Interstate and Pipestone, our destination, the two-lane state highway skirts the western edge of Jasper, a small village about three miles from South Dakota. The poet John William Burgon, in the early 19th century, described the stone-cut temples and pink sandstone arcades of Petra as a “rose-red city half as old as time.” The Chamber of Commerce for Pipestone County, where Jasper is located once used similar words to describe this village – “a rose-red city on the prairie.” Even today, Sioux quartzite is mined from a quarry near town and most of the structures in this hamlet are incongruously massive and eternal with the stuff. Even some of the single-family residences are sepulchral mausoleums made from stacked ashlars of Sioux quartzite. In the sunshine, the town glitters in a sinister way, a thousand serpents’ eyes glinting in the red blocks; under overcast skies with wet puddles spreading out over the vacant intersections, the stone looks dark as congealed blood. The town’s name is a misnomer: jasper is a semi-precious gem, mentioned in the book of Revelations, for instance, a kind of striated chalcedony that is kin to agate.
23.
In this part of the world, tornadoes are common. If you live here long enough, you will see one in your life, and, maybe, two or three (if you are lucky). For instance, Austin, Minnesota, where I live, has experienced several devastating tornadoes. In August 1928, a tornado swept through the downtown area and tore open most of the buildings. The Park Movie Theater was demolished by the winds and pipes from its pipe organ were found deposited in fields seventeen miles away. I recall a tornado that touched down south of Austin in the mid-1980's, ripping off the roof of Echo Lanes, a bowling alley. (There’s now a bar and grill at the bowling alley called “The Twister Lounge”.) At the Old Courthouse Museum in Sioux Falls, an exhibit displays a twisted metal girder and a tree chainsawed down by cyclone winds. These are artifacts of a tornado that tore through Sioux Falls, just south of the city, on July 9, 1932 – the twister shredded a bridge and the Neptune Casino on the Big Sioux River. Remarkably, another tornado roared through that same exact area, the suburbs at 41st Street South, on September 10, 2019, this time demolishing a Pizza Ranch restaurant.
One of the most famous photographs of a twister ever taken depicts the so-called Jasper tornado, a storm that spiraled along the South Dakota border on July 7, 1927. A South Dakota schoolgirl, Lucille Handberg, saw the storm roaring across the open prairie, about three or four miles west of Jasper. She pursued the twister with her camera in hand and took three photographs. One of them is iconic, showing an empty expanse of prairie with an ornate, baroque-looking tornado crocheted into the black overhanging clouds. The cyclone is bent in an elegant arabesque and has its snout buried in a turbulent whorl of dust and debris. The image became famous throughout the world when it was published in the London Times about a year later. The picture adorns the album cover of Miles Davis’ Bitch’s Brew (1970), Deep Purple’s eponymously named record from 1974, and, later, Siouxsie and the Banshee’s Tinderbox in 1986.
Because they are light-weight, Muffler Men giants are particularly prone to destruction in windstorms. Many of them have been blown across the skies by straight-line winds and, of course, hurled aloft by tornadoes. Can you imagine seeing a twenty-foot tall figure of a man whirling through the sky on the black, debris congested winds of a tornado? In some cases, tornadoes have sheared off the heads of Muffler Men giants, in effect, beheading them. Reports tell of severed giant heads found miles from fiber-glass torsos decapitated in tempests.
24.
Driving past Jasper, a strange idea occurs to me. I think of the old Minnehaha County Courthouse with its central tower pointing skyward. The Courthouse tower supports the scales of Justice. On one scale there is an immeasurably heavy ashlar hewn from Sioux quartzite, a block that is the color of ox-blood. On the opposing scale, a tornado savagely whirls, it’s weight measured in lightning, wind, and rain bearing down in equipoise to the red stone. Miles Davis’ trumpet wails over the scene.
25.
I’m pretty familiar with Pipestone. In the early nineteen-nineties, I was involved in litigation arising from a horrible accident on a farm a few miles from the town, the county seat of Pipestone County. We took several days of depositions in the courthouse, a heavy Victorian building made from Sioux quartzite with interior fireplaces in some of the conference rooms fashioned from polished petrified wood. The case involved a man disfigured badly by burns that occurred when leaking propane ignited and engulfed him in a flash fire. There was later litigation involving the man’s negligent treatment by a surgeon at a local hospital – that case also involved several depositions in Pipestone. I spent a week at the Calumet Inn, a boutique hotel in the center of the town. Then, twenty-five years later, I defended a case involving another fire, an explosion that happened when a gas-fired heater ignited manure pit gas and burned two women to death. For me, the red hue of Sioux quartzite signifies fire and burning.
The town today looks much the same as it did in the nineties. The downtown is comprised of red buildings mostly made from unpolished quartzite, heavy piles of rock bearing down on the flat prairie. On the north of town, a big quarry has been full of deep water for a hundred years. Some bleachers overlook the circular pond and there’s a few windowless wooden sheds containing, I think, props for the annual Hiawatha festival, a pageant based on Longfellow’s poem put on by local people. (The only place in the world where Longfellow’s little epic is still read is Pipestone, Minnesota). I attended the pageant one summer with my kids and recall that people dressed as Native Americans stood atop a wooded cliff on the opposite side of the quarry lagoon. Some lithe canoes were launched and there was a battle with bows and arrows and the beautiful Minnehaha pined for her heroic lover. At the climax of the show, the brave Hiawatha leaped from the cliff top, diving thirty feet into the cold water to battle a sea-serpent while fireworks splashed and sizzled overhead and were reflected in the surface of the pond. A trio of house-high glacial erratics stands next to the sidewalk leading to the bleachers and the ticket kiosk. These are the so-called Three Maidens, reputed to be Dakota sisters turned to stone giants in some Native American variant on Ovid.
About a half-mile from the pageant grounds, Pipestone National Historic Site protects the ancient quarries where soft red catlinite was extracted from under overhangs of heavy, impenetrable Sioux quartzite. These are the quarries from which the Oneota at Blood Run mined pipestone, cutting it into readily transported blanks, and trading this merchandise at their village about fifty miles to the southwest. Pipestone or catlinite (named after the artist George Catlin one of the first Whites to visit the site) is secreted in veins between layers of quartzite. It’s not exactly clear to me how catlinite is formed. The mineral is said to be metamorphosized mudstone – that is, fine grain sand that has not entirely transformed to stone. Catlinite is said to “butter smooth” and can be readily cut with a hacksaw or even a knife. I don’t know if catlinite is a precursor to Sioux quartzite that has not yet be subjected to the metamorphic forces that have created the much harder rock or, instead, some sort of relic sediment protected in the matrix of the quartzite. At the National Historic Site, a quarry is open to the public and you can walk down some steps to a polished Sioux quartzite floor made from elegantly irregular slabs of rock pieced together in a jigsaw pattern; it was wet and, therefore, slippery when Angelica and I visited. At the base of a nine-foot face of hard red quartzite, an 18 inch vein, like a thread of dark pink toothpaste is crushed down by the fortress wall of harder stone. Catlinite, particularly when polished, is one of those substances that exerts a great tactile attraction – to see the stuff is to want to touch and caress it. Pipestone will take a fine polish and looks sweet, almost edible, like frosting on a cake or the filling of jelly donut. In the museum on the site, you can stroke your fingers over the pipestone and it’s cool and very smooth and, even, has a soothing, soft texture. Visiting this place, once a national monument, but, I think, now with the status of national park (whatever that means) is a supremely tactile, haptic experience. The quarries have a physical presence like animals half-buried in the prairie and the quartzite cliffs behind their veils of invasive trees shimmer, fractured into all sorts of strange stone effigies, the rocky profiles of men and beasts, and a cool breeze radiates from the waterfall that plunges over the ornate red escarpment and, then, runs as fleet as a prairie antelope across the grasslands studded with big square-cut boulders, rocks that are all natural but that seem to have hewn by giants with colossal hands.
26.
They won’t take your money in the visitor center but you can put ten dollars, if you want, in a fishbowl near the entrance. The staff seem to be mostly Native Americans. When I visited, the park rangers were disengaged, watching the Viking football game on their cell-phones. The historic pipes once displayed in the small museum have been removed out of concern for the sensibilities of the tribes – pipestone is a sacred substance and the ancient pipes have religious significance. However, you can see modern objects made for the market in display cases, fanciful images of bison and bears and turtles. (Turtles are fertility symbols and, when I bought a turtle pendant on a necklace for my wife thirty years ago, she promptly became pregnant.) A couple of craftspeople, an old Indian lady and a man who looked like a burly biker , were sawing through little slabs of pipestone gripped by vises with their hacksaws. Sometimes, the artisans worked with sandpaper and grit to polish the rock.
You can walk across the prairie, now adorned with red sumac, to the escarpment, a two-mile long cliff complicated in modern times by invasive trees and shrubs, a fractured stone wall with big fallen boulders fortifying its base. (Catlin made some paintings of the quarries in the 1830's and, in his images, there are no trees at all, just a red snake-like cliff with tiny figures at its base and the white ray of a waterfall in the center of palisades.) The walk across the prairie is pleasant, with a wet wind blowing out of the west and the sky heavy and moist with rain clouds. At the cliffs, sound seems absorbed by the rock pinnacles and tilted slabs of Sioux quartzite and it is silent, the smell of lichen on the boulders activated as a musty perfume by the drizzle that fell here earlier. The trail winds through the maze of car-size boulders along the base of the low cliffs to an alcove where a waterfall, now controlled I think by an upstream weir, droops gracefully over the escarpment. The stream runs over some rubble and, then, braids its way across the prairie, opening up into a small lagoon where some hip-high square boulders stand half-drowned in the pool. (I have always thought that this part of the stream has the delicate and abstract aspect of a fine Japanese woodcut.) Near the Visitor Center, there is a pit called the Spotted Quarry (this is because the pipestone extracted here is flecked with red blotches of hematite). A picture on an explanatory marker shows a crowd of ragged-looking Indians posed atop big heaps of spoil hacked out of the quarry; the image looks like it was taken about 110 years ago. The pipestone layer is buried ten feet under what the Indians term “the second hardest rock in the world” and had to be laboriously excavated from the pit knocked into the rock with hand tools (hammers and wedges) used by the Indian miners. The opening down into the rock next to the ramparts of 18-inch long debitage is narrow, a crooked funnel into the ground like the entrance to a cave.
The rock faces of the Three Maidens a third of a mile away, once were adorned with pictographs. People, however, vandalized those surfaces and, so, a local doctor peeled the pictographs off the rocks and kept the tombstone-sized slabs in his garden. After his death, the petroglyph slabs migrated to the Visitor Center. The images show geometric forms, lines and grids, and several quadrupeds too vaguely incised to be identified. There are also several humanoid forms. These look very old to me with shield-shaped torsos and small heads such as you might see on a wasp or a praying mantis. Skittery little lines, representations of some kind of aura or force field, radiate out from the shoulders and heads of these figures. Whether they are gods or warriors or giants of some kind bearing on their scapula shawls of magic power is unknown.
Up on the cliffs, Joseph Nicollet, an early surveyor and explorer of this area, the so-called Coteau des Prairies, spent some time incising his initials into a flat-topped boulder on one of the cliffs. With his four-man surveying team, he camped here from June 29 to July 6, 1838. The two-mile long palisade of the escarpment faces west and, therefore, caught the rays of the setting sun. Nicollet wrote: “This admirable hill awaits the poet and the painter who should visit it when the last rays of the setting sun are falling upon it.” Stepping down from the rock stairs that lead to the inscription, you will see some beautiful examples of stone ripples in the quartzite. Be careful; the ripples make the step a little tricky.
Often when you visit this park, you will observe some burly Native American guys huffing and puffing at the bottom of holes aligned alongside the parking lot by the Visitor Center. Native Americans are the only people authorized to mine the catlinite out of these pits and, by custom, they work with only hand tools. Catlinite is the red flesh of the earth itself and the substance from which the God made his people. Many of the trees under the cliffs are festooned with tobacco offerings in brightly colored knots of fabric. This is one of those rare places thought to be sacred where, in fact, there is some subtle aspect of the landscape, something austere and indefinable, that imparts a religious aura to the grass and the boulders and the trees nestling up to the red rock cliffs.
The clouds open a little window to the west and, briefly, the sun ignites the wild flowers in the fields and draws the amber bumble-bees from where they have been hiding and, then, sky clots up again and threatens rain. Angelica and I drive from Pipestone across the prairie under lowering clouds to the petroglyphs at Jasper about seventy or eighty miles away.
27.
Even Abraham Lincoln believed that giants were buried in the mounds densely distributed about the Mississippi River basin. Around 1848, Lincoln visited Niagara Falls and wrote some notes, possibly intending them for a speech. The text is handwritten and fragmentary, labeled “for a lecture.” In the writing, Lincoln says that the spectacle of the falls has existed since the dawn of time and that people contemporary with Jesus Christ, just like modern viewers, would have stood in awe at the side of the great cataract. He writes: “When Columbus first sought this continent – when Christ suffered on the cross – when Moses led Israel through the Red Sea – then, as now, Niagara was roaring here. The eyes of that species of extinct giants, whose bones fill the mounds of America, have gazed on Niagara as ours do now.” (Lincoln’s premise is geologically false – Niagara Falls is continuously eroding the escarpment over which it plunges and has moved miles back upstream over the millenia.)
Archaeologists who unearthed giant bones said they were Nephillim or Canaanites. When the Hebrews sent spies into the promised land, they found it was populated by giants, Canaanites, to whom “(we) were as grasshoppers are to us.” These findings were interpreted ideologically: the skeletons were the bones of “white tribalists” whose advanced culture was drowned in the sea of savagery associated with the primitive and untutored Native Americans inhabiting the land. The Indians against whom the United States was waging a genocidal war had, themselves, dispossessed and, possibly, slaughtered the Canaanite giants once occupying the Midwest.
28.
Bands of rain succeeded one another, cold droplets splashing my windshield. My Indian pony, Honda, flew like the wind across the prairie, skirting the edges of tiny desolate hamlet. I had painted circles around the beast’s headlights to increase their penetration through mist and drizzle. Red handprints of murdered foes marked the flanks of my pony and lightning insignia decorated my tires.
A spur road, crosses the grassland to the Jeffers Petroglyphs visitor center. The parking lot was full, SUVs and cars pulled up at the trough like piglets feeding. The visitor center is sleek, with skylights, and looks like a suburban dentist’s office. The first time I came here, the road was gravel and there was no visitor center and the shields of quartzite extruded flush against the pasture were scarcely ringed by some barb wire posts. Now, the site is protected by the Minnesota Historical Society and must be approached through the visitor center and there is a ten dollar a head fee for entry. (All weekend, other museums and sites that we visited were free to enter, and, so, the admission charge was a little disconcerting.)
In big letters near the entrance to the visitor center, a sign proclaims “THIS IS DAKOTA LAND.” This sort of “virtue signaling” is distasteful to me and, immediately, set me against the place. For most of my life, the Minnesota Historical Society has viewed the subjects of its study through an ideological lens – simply put the Historical Society is fiercely (and, even, irrationally) anti-colonialist, presenting Minnesota’s past as an unrelenting class struggle between wicked oppressors and those they have persistently, and cruelly, exploited. Of course, the application of this ideology to the history of Native Americans had led to some bizarre, and ridiculous, distortions of the narrative presented, systematically, I think, denying any real agency to the Indians. In any event, I don’t know what it means to proclaim that the Jeffers petroglyph site is “Dakota land.” Is the historical society paying rent to one or more of the tribes that now identify as Dakota? Does tribal sovereignity apply on this acreage? Should you be able to buy tobacco free of sales tax here? And what about the earlier possessors of this terrain – do the Dakota have precedence by reason of their violent conquest of this area disseizing (as it were) the Ojibway, for instance, or the Oneota? If so, how is this any more fair than the fact that European settlers dispossessed the Sioux? If conquest and ethnic cleansing accord rights to the victor, something that seems to be the case pragmatically, then, why is there an attempt to reverse history to claim that this is Dakota land? As an old, angry White man, this absurd territorial claim, faithfully mouthed at Guthrie Theater performances and before other cultural events, is immediately offputting and causes me to be skeptical of the whole enterprise. And, indeed, the Jeffers petroglyphs are very old, some of them dating perhaps to the time when mastodon roamed these plains, certainly, rock marks made when that species of extinct giants (whose bones fill the mounds) occupied this land – and, so, do these petroglyphs have any connection at all to the historic tribes that once claimed this area? Passing Lakota, I assume, camped near these prominent outcroppings of Sioux quartzite and puzzled over the indistinct patterns pecked into the hard stone by people ancient to them – no different, really, than the modern visitors who have come here from Minneapolis and St. Paul or, from Sioux Falls on their swift Honda ponies.
A harried-looking young girl staffs the admission desk. She is white as white can be with pinkish edges to her eyes. An elderly couple is paying to see the petroglyphs. The girl says that a guided tour will walk out to the petroglyphs in forty minutes, led by a Native American with insight into the marks. The old people are in a hurry, going somewhere and its late in the afternoon, and, so, they indicate that they will stroll out to the stone themselves. The girl is a little indignant, perhaps, interpreting their impatience as an insult to the Native American docent, and, so, she asks them if they have been here before. “No,” one of them says. “Well,” she says, “you can go on your own but you won’t be able to see anything. Someone has to show you where to look because the marks are so faint.” Her tone of voice is condescending, particularly since this couple has just paid twenty bucks to see something that, apparently, can’t really be seen. They shrug and set off through the door to the trail. The skies now are dark and turbulent. Around a corner there’s a darkened alcove in which a video on loop is playing. I can hear the sound of a Native American flute playing, some New Age harmonics, a soft lilting voice. I put down my twenty and we exit the building and walk out to the stone.
29.
The petroglyphs are carved into a reef of flat red stone surfacing at the crest of a little knoll. A path about a third of a mile long crosses the prairie, marked at intervals by knee-high signs describing how the Indians made use of indigenous plants growing in this place. At the outcropping, several couples are scrutinizing the rock surface and complaining that they can’t see much of anything. The historical society has scrubbed the green and grey lichens off the quartzite expanse and, if you compare images on placards posted near the rock with the stone surface, and, if you use your imagination, you might see some faint outlines chiseled there. The petroglyphs are marked as solid dark indentations on the white signs that simulate the array of incisions and pecked outlines on the stone. If you adjust your eyes (it’s like seeing in very dim light) and find one of the bigger marks on the rock, then, you can, sometimes, see a couple additional lines. But it’s taxing and you quickly tire of sorting through ambiguous visual evidence, random dents and chips in the reddish rock, required to see anything at all. Adding to the difficulty are the innumerable initials and dates chiseled into the stone by six generations of local kids. The more noteworthy petroglyphs, the older marks that depict floating beings with bug heads and enigmatic shaggy animals, are very faint and I can’t be sure that I actually saw them. There is a distinction here between looking and seeing. Either you spend all afternoon sprawled out on the rock testing out your eyes by sliding fingers into the grooves in the stone (something that would probably not be allowed) or you pick out one or two pecked outlines, shrug your shoulders, and hike back to the visitor center.
As we peered into the rock, as if looking into a very dark room, the sky grew shadowy overhead and the drizzle intensified so that the surface of the rock was wet and indistinct with falling drops. Angelica and I hustled back across the open prairie to the Visitor Center. The wind picked up and hurled rain into our eyes. One of the old ladies ahead of us on the trail unfurled an umbrella which barked a little in the wind. The old grasshoppers, big and heavy, the last of this summer’s generation, retreated into the tall grass, no longer spurting out at our ankles and knees.
The Native American tour-guide, a nice-looking Indian woman, was standing next to the girl at the admission desk, waiting, it seemed, for the squall to subside. The most recent visitors were sitting in the alcove watching the film loop – soothing New Age music sounded there. The Indian woman must have been appalled by my appearance – I suppose that I looked like a drowned sewer rat. She reached out to hand me a towel, but, for some reason, I thought that I should be stoic and, so, I rejected her offer. She asked: “You don’t want a towel?” I replied: “No, it’s nice and cool. Pleasant sort of.” I went into the toilet and wiped off my glasses on a paper towel. It was still raining as we dashed to the car. I was wet and my shoulders and trousers were damp and the blowing air in the Honda chilled me. I don’t know why I didn’t accept the towel proffered to me. This has bothered me for days and, I’m sure that if I deliberated about this, I would uncover bad motives and be appalled by them.
30.
If giants existed, the Nephillim or Canaanites interred in burial mounds, then, of course, their bones should also exist. There are hundreds of pictures of men in mud pits standing next to hip-high femurs or skulls the size of Volkswagens. But all of these bones seemed to have vanished, victims of a conspiracy to conceal the truth at the Smithsonian, but, also, inexplicably everywhere else in the world. In fact, giant bones have been found and thought to be of human origin, but invariable the skeletal remains turn out to be prehistoric megafauna – that is, mastodon femurs and skulls (often claimed to be the skeletal relics of one-eyed Cyclops creatures), the long bones of extinct cave bears and sloths. One giant bone turned out to be human; physical anthropologists established that the man to whom the thigh-bone once belonged would have stood five foot eight inches tall.
But what about the Supreme Court case decreeing that the Smithsonian cease and desist from destroying the relics of human giants? Surely, the proceedings of the Supreme Court are public and readily accessible and no one would lie about the existence of a case reportedly decided by that tribunal. But cursory review shows that the plaintiff in that lawsuit, the American Institute of Alternative Archaeologists (AIAA) is an imaginary association; there is no record of the AIAA existing anywhere and at anytime. So, needless to say, there were never any opinion and court proceedings, because there was no case. The whole thing is made up.
And, in any event, the so-called “square-cube law”, renders the existence of giants in human form an impossibility. The square cube law says that a body that is double the size of its ordinary dimensions has four times the surface area of the smaller form; similarly, if we double the size of a body, it’s volume will be eight times that of the original body. Since volume is correlated to weight or mass, this means that if we imagine a human being twice the size of a two-hundred pound man, that giant would weight 800 pounds. Therefore, the giant’s bones would be inadequate to support his weight; on the giant’s first weight-bearing step, his femurs would snap and the poor fellow would be helpless, a huge pudding of flesh sprawled out on the ground. David wouldn’t have needed a stone and sling to kill Goliath; the giant would have collapsed in a heap of broken bones on his first sortie.
The square-cube law explains why actual human giants are invariably pathetic figures. Robert Wadlow lived in Alton, Illinois. By all accounts, he was an unassuming, dignified fellow, a distinguished member of the youth group associated with the Freemasons, the Order of Demolay, and, when he died, he was studying law. Wadlow was six foot five inches long when he was ten. He died at the age of 22 and his corpse was measured to be eight foot eleven inches long. (He weighed 457 pounds but looked conspicuously lean.) Wadlow’s ankle snapped when he was attending a festival at the Manistee National Forest in Michigan’s lower peninsula (this was a failure of the orthotic braces that he always wore) – this was in July 1940. He died from blood infection. Wadlow was said to be very slow-moving and wore elaborate braces on his legs.
John Rogan, born to freed slaves in 1867, lived longer. He was 39 when he died in 1906. At that time, he was eight feet nine inches tall. Rogan was sometimes called “the living skeleton” because he seemed to be greatly emaciated. He was never able to walk, most of his joints were anklyosed or fused. Rogan moved around in a cart pulled by a team of goats. When he died, his family feared that his bones would be looted from his grave and, so, his corpse was said to be entombed in cement at a hidden location.
October 3, 2023
