What’s the story behind the red rock of Minnesota’s Pipestone National Monument?

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PIPESTONE, Minn. - For thousands of years, Native Americans have quarried a sacred, soft red rock from a patch of Minnesota prairie.

Aidan Thornton, a reader from Minneapolis, has visited the site, now Pipestone National Monument, several times. He wrote to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project, to ask about the site’s geological and historical origins: What’s the story behind this special place?

It’s the same question carver Travis Erickson asked himself three decades ago while standing at the bottom of a quarry pit.

Erickson was quarrying for pipestone. He had dug through seven or eight feet of Sioux quartzite, a rock harder than steel. Suddenly, there was a breakthrough. He could see, in a vein in the earth, the reddish-pink pipestone used by his ancestors for centuries.

“I was sitting there looking at it,” Erickson recalled, “and I said, ‘God, how did this come to be?’”

Today Erickson, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota nation, is a demonstrator at Pipestone National Monument. He shares stories about pipestone with many of the 80,000 or so visitors to the site each year. The rock is “metamorphosed clay” from an ancient riverbed, he said.

Over millennia, the sand became compressed and turned into a hard, durable rock known as Sioux Quartzite. Thin layers of clay, sandwiched between shielding quartzite layers, transformed into what is known in geological terms as “catlinite.”

The name came from George Catlin, who visited the quarry in 1836. But among the tribal nations, the name in English is simply “pipestone.”

Pipestone is as soft as a fingernail, able to be carved by metal tools or even sharpened rocks. The best pieces carve like “butter,” Erickson said.

While there are about half a dozen other pipestone deposits around the country, the stones in Minnesota are special, because they have little to no hard quartzite embedded in them. Pipestone from Wisconsin and Kansas is harder to carve, Erickson said.

Demonstrators like Erickson, who has worked at the monument since 2000, use modern tools like hacksaws and nail files to shape the pipestone. But they can also show visitors the ancient drills or stone tools that their ancestors may have used.

As Erickson carved during a recent demonstration, fine dust from the pipestone flew into the air. He said he’s tasted the dust many times over the years. It tastes like baby powder, with a tinge of iron.

The stone’s red color comes from the oxidation of trace amounts of iron.

Erickson’s relatives used to throw pipestone dust on their garden to grow tomatoes as big as softballs, he said. His family has a joke about how one day he’ll be cremated, and all that’ll be left of him is the pipestone dust he’s breathed in.

To him, pipestone is the perfect material to carve whatever anyone would want. But the stone talks sometimes, he said. While carving, it can have a will of its own.

He said sometimes a slab will keep calling out to him. He’ll pick it up and ask it what it wants to be.

Pipestone National Monument became a federally protected area in 1937, through an act of Congress signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This came after decades of complex land disputes, including a lawsuit brought by the Ihanktonwan tribe that wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court. From the 1890s to 1950s, the federal government ran the Pipestone Indian Boarding School adjacent to the monument site.

Today, any Native American enrolled in a recognized tribe has the right to quarry the pipestone at the site. Before doing so, they need to apply for a quarry permit and show proof of enrollment. There are long waiting lists for annual quarry permits, but monthly, weekly and daily permits are readily available.

The 301-acre federal park includes 56 pipestone quarry pits and surrounding tallgrass prairie. In 2020, new exhibits that emphasize generational and spiritual connections to pipestone opened at the monument.

Staff members worked with 23 affiliated tribes to develop the new programming.

Quarriers extract rock the old-fashioned way. They use sledgehammers and wedges to to break through the quartzite shield, a process that can take months or even years until they can reach the soft pipestone.

“We can quarry in the footsteps of our ancestors from thousands of years ago,” said Pederson, a fourth generation pipe maker and a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Nation. “It’s an honor to do it the same way.”

The end result is the bowl of a sacred pipe, filled with aromatics: tobacco, red osier dogwood bark, sumac leaves, bearberry, rose bushes.

The name “peace pipe” came as a result of European Americans often seeing the pipes at treaty signings. But they’re used for many other occasions and daily rituals.

Gabrielle Drapeau, a ranger at the park and a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, also known as Ihanktonwan, grew up attending ceremonies in Pipestone, walking the quarry trail.

Creation stories for the pipe vary among tribes. Drapeau‘s father used to tell her about a deluge that swamped the area a long time ago and killed most of the land’s inhabitants.

Their blood seeped into the stone and made the pipestone red. Later, smoke from the pipes became a way to communicate with higher powers.

“This is how we pray, this is like our church,” Drapeau said. “This place is incredibly significant for that reason.”

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