ontrol and jurisdiction
of the Indians and is not included in any of their reservations, though
near the Sisseton agency. It is located on the summit of the high divide
between the Missouri and St. Peter's rivers in Minnesota, at a point not
far from where the ninety-seventh meridian of longitude (from Greenwich)
intersects the forty-fifth parallel of latitude. The divide was named
by the French Coteau des Prairies, and the quarry is near its southern
extremity. Not a tree or bush could be seen from the majestic mound
when I last was there, some twenty years ago--nothing but the apparently
interminable plains, until they were lost in the deep blue of the
horizon.

The luxury of smoking appears to have been known to all the tribes on
the continent in their primitive state, and they indulge in the habit
to excess; any one familiar with their life can assert that the American
savage smokes half of his time. Where so much attention is given to a
mere pleasure, it naturally follows that he would devote his leisure and
ingenuity to the construction of his pipe. The bowls of these were, from
time immemorial, made of the peculiar red stone from the famous quarry
referred to, which, until only a little over fifty years ago, was never
visited by a white man, its sanctity forbidding any such sacrilege.

That the spot should have been visited for untold centuries by all the
Indian nations, who hid their weapons as they approached it, under fear
of the vengeance of the Great Spirit, will not seem strange when the
religion of the race is understood. One of the principal features of the
quarry is a perpendicular wall of granite about thirty feet high, facing
the west, and nearly two miles long. At the base of the wall there is
a level prairie, running parallel to it, half a mile wide. Under this
strip of land, after digging through several slaty layers of rock, the
red sandstone is found. Old graves, fortifications, and excavations
abound, all confirmatory of the traditions clustering around the weird
place.

Within a few rods of the base of the wall is a group of immense gneiss
boulders, five in number, weighing probably many hundred tons each, and
under these are two holes in which two imaginary old women reside--the
guardian spirits of the quarry--who were always consulted before any
pipe-stone could be dug up. The veneration for this group of boulders
was something wonderful; not a spear of grass was broken or bent by his
feet