The Hand-Worked Quarries at Pipestone

The stone is the size of a folded hand. It is red in a way that red things rarely are, a red like a prairie sunset carried into the ground and held there until the color became mineral. Darker veins branch through it like old river channels, and the fresh-cut edge is smooth, faintly waxen, the color of raw clay.

The stone came out of a trench cut into a shelf of pink-gray quartzite on a prairie rise near the town of Pipestone, in the southwest corner of Minnesota. The trench is not a deep mine. It follows a narrow seam of rock that has been opened again and again, shored with slabs pried from the surrounding wall, and partly filled with rain when the weather turns. Around it the tallgrass prairie bends under the wind, and a creek runs across the ledges and drops into a small pool.

Before anyone can carve the pipestone, someone has to get it out of the ground. The people who come here do that with hammers and steel wedges and pry bars, working slowly around the edges of the seam until the stone lifts free in one unbroken piece. The method is not a show set up for visitors. It is the old way, carried on by regulation and by a conviction that some work should not be hurried.

A Right Older Than the Monument

For a long time before there was a state named Minnesota or a town named Pipestone, this red rock was a meeting ground. Nations from across the plains came to dig it, shape it into pipes and other sacred objects, and carry it home across distances that took months to cross. The quarries were held as a common ground among the peoples who used them, and the red stone was the thing that made the meeting matter.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States was pressing treaties across the Dakota lands of western Minnesota. When the land around the quarry was ceded, the quarry itself was kept back. The treaty language reserved the pipestone ground to the Indian nations, so that the soft red stone would remain available to the hands that had always worked it.

Later, the land around the quarry was made a national monument, giving the pipestone country formal protection. But the law carefully left the right of the stone where it had always been. At Pipestone National Monument, the quarry itself is reserved to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes. They may take what they need by hand, and the rough stone leaves the park in their keeping.

The red stone does not become ordinary once it leaves the ground.

The Hands That Still Come Down

Some of the old quarry pits are overgrown, filled with grass and rubble. Others are freshly worked, their edges clean where a pry bar has bitten into the quartzite. The active pits are not deep holes but open cuts, a few feet across, with the red seam running along the bottom like a buried road. In them, a worker kneels or crouches at the face of the rock, setting a chisel along the seam and striking it with a hammer. The sound is a small, hard tap that carries far over the prairie and the still water of the creek.

Many of the people who quarry here are pipestone carvers. They take the rough blocks home and work them with files and sand and water, shaping the bowl of a pipe or a small effigy over weeks. A rough block that has been worked with files grows smoother, but the color stays alive; the red seems to come from underneath, as if the stone were still holding the heat of an old fire. The finished pipestone has a polish that looks soft rather than shiny, and it darkens with use. The pipes are not souvenirs. They are made to be used in ceremony, and the smoke that passes through them is understood as a kind of speech carried upward.

When winter comes to southwest Minnesota, the quarrying stops. The snow piles into the open cuts and the creek freezes over the quartzite ledges. The red seam waits. In the spring, when the ground softens, the same pits are opened again, and the same hands come back to them. There are newer faces among them, younger people who learned the feel of the stone from their elders. The right has been passed along without being written down anywhere except in the use of the ground.

At the end of the day, a quarry worker climbs out of the cut with a rough piece of the seam in the crook of an arm. It will travel home, then into a workshop, then into the hands of someone who will smoke it in a ceremony or keep it for the kind of talk that happens between people who have decided to speak truly to one another. The right to work the red stone did not begin with the national monument, and it does not end there. It is an older claim, held in the same red layers that the prairie has kept all along.

Pipestone National Monument

Photos: RadBadNomad (CC BY-SA 4.0)