Minnesota - Day 27 - to Pipestone and Blue Mounds

Blue Mounds State Park, Luverne

Tuesday, 27 September 2022

today's route

As you can see, the first 2 hours of today's drive were pretty much straight west toward South Dakota.

I passed a body of water where I saw one adult and 4 half-grown swans.  Very pretty.

I heard on the radio that the State of Minnesota, with the help of the home-grown 3M Company, has been developing road markers that are still visible even when wet.  They call them "wet reflection" markers.  I hadn't even thought about it until I heard this, but it's true that the lines in the road are really hard to see when it's raining.

In the town of Sleepy Eye, pop. 3,452, I passed a facility labeled Balchem, which I hadn't heard of.  But it seems to be a Nebraska-based company that develops nutrition related products.  The town's name, by the way, came from the nearby Lake Sleepy Eye, which was named for Chief Sleepy Eye who was one of 4 Sioux Natives who met with Pres. James Monroe when negotiating yet another treaty.  The chief was known as a compassionate man who had a droopy eyelid, hence the name.

In Cobden, pop. 36, I passed a large facility for Farmward, which I learned is a major co-op in MN.

I started seeing fields of unharvested corn - dying plants that still obviously had ears of corn on the stalks.  In fact, that's almost all I saw today were corn fields like this.  Is this how they harvest the corn used for ethanol?  Or are these just plants that died too soon because of the ongoing drought?

Later I saw chicken farms, flocks of sheep and fields of dead soybeans.

Then I came to the town of Walnut Grove, pop. 871, which calls itself the Childhood Home of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  On the water tower is the slogan "On the Banks of Plum Creek," the title of Ms. Wilder's autobiography - and the town does actually sit near Plum Creek.  I crossed it.

The town of Tracy, pop. 2,163, says it's "A Great Place To Live."

By this point we were ready for a break, and we stopped at the town of Balaton, pop. 643, at the Lake Yankton City Park.  Dext and I walked around the park and I saw a sign that surprised me.

This is a small slice of Lake Yankton.

And here's the sign.

Okay - I'm here when it's still summer moving into fall, and I'd completely forgotten all these bodies of water I've been seeing all month would likely freeze during the winter and people might want to go ice skating on them.  This sign brought it all home to me.

I saw a sign in the town of Tyler, pop. 1,143, advertising their Æbelskiver Days that celebrate their Danish heritage.  I'd forgotten what that is until I saw a picture of it online.  It seems to me I once had one of these pans and tried to make these pastries.  This Wikipedia article has several good photos of them.   https://en.wikipedia.org/aebleskiver

I saw a wind farm being built.  The pillars were in place and the blades were lying on the ground next to each pillar, with cranes dotted here and there starting to assemble them.

The town of Lake Benton, pop. 683, is in an area with a lot of chicken farms, and more corn and more cows.

Then we arrived at the Pipestone National Monument.

I took this photo mainly because of the grass you can see
in the photo and is discussed below.

I've been seeing bits and pieces of the tall grass and
short grass prairies all over in my travels, and this is a
bit more of the tall grass prairie, apparently.

There was an exhibit about these grasses in the visitor center, and I'll include that here as well.

This is the whole sign.
Enlargements below.

examples of grasses

This national monument was established to protect both the specific type of stone that's here as well as the area itself, which has been a sacred area for a number of tribes for thousands of years.  Land ownership here is yet another example of the unethical dealings the US government had with the Native Americans.  And despite the US Supreme Court agreeing they did indeed have a treaty right to the land, it took many years more before at least the access to it was guaranteed.

Pipestone is a sandstone with an unusual red color that's specific to this area of the country. 

The vein lies beneath a heavy layer of quartzite that must be removed before the pipestone is exposed.

These are the old tools that were used historically.
That axe head looks like a hamburger bun to me, but it's a rock.

And here's what the finished product looks like:

Caption enlarged below.

There were also exhibits about how the pipestone deposits formed and the effects of glaciers on the land.  Most importantly, there were several Native craftspeople who were working with the pipestone there.  I talked with one man who told me he was the latest in a very long line in his family of pipestone carvers.  But he said he was afraid he'd be the last because none of his children was interested in learning.  He said they were all too attached to their electronic devices to care about this tradition - that they were creative but their creativity showed in other fields than carving.

I guess that happens in all kinds of crafts and not always because of electronics.  My grandmother was a prolific quilt maker, but it never occurred to me to ask her about it and she died when I was still young.  I wish now that I knew what she'd known about the skill.  And of course it seems even more of a shame when the craft involves a way of life that's had to fight to stay alive, as the Native American crafts have done.

The park service had a handout about how to show respect for Native identity.  For instance, it says, "Avoid the term "Indian."  Use "Indigenous," "Native American," or "American Indian" instead.  So I asked the young woman at the reception desk about the information I'd gotten at a tribal museum in Oklahoma (she said she herself was from Oklahoma), where the worker there had told me that "Indian" was a perfectly acceptable term.  I'd asked because in Alaska, "Indian" is a completely wrong word to use, and "Native" is the correct term, but displays at the OK museum used "Indian."  When I told this story to the woman here at Pipestone, she said she didn't know why the woman told me that in OK and I'd be safest if I just stuck to "Native" since I'm used to that.

This handout, by the way, also says, "Do not ask about blood quantum or DNA percentage."  I'm assuming people actually do ask that, because otherwise they wouldn't have included it on the list.  But the idea seems appalling to me - have we really lost all sense of personal boundaries these days?

From Pipestone, I drove another 20 miles down the road to Blue Mounds State Park.  As far as I can tell, this park was created to protect a bison herd that grazes here on one of the state's largest prairie remnants.  I saw the bison from a little distance and didn't feel any need to try to get closer (if you've seen one bison . . .).  The park's name came from a 100' tall cliff of quartzite that looks pink but apparently looked blue in the distance to early settlers, who gave them the "blue mounds" name.  It also protects a long line of rocks that early tribes aligned with the spring and fall equinoxes.  I didn't see any of those rocks, being pretty tired by then and just wanting to get to our campsite.