![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
For many people, the Minnesota River Valley is full of shadows.
In 1862, years of greed and misunderstanding erupted into a clash that cost settlers their lives, the Dakota their homeland and
a new state its innocence. Even today, the valley's lush peacefulness is undercut by anger and guilt.
But on the first weekend of August, people of indigenous and European descent alike come to Upper Sioux Agency State Park to have a good time. At a wacipi, or powwow, the tradition of welcoming outsiders has held steady for many generations.
They’re dramatic characters — serpents of the underworld, and thunderbirds who shoot lightening bolts from their eyes. There are buffalos and stick figures and atlatls, a spear-throwing device, but no bow and arrows, which began to replace the atlatl 1,000 years ago. There are handprints, said to be the place where “rock men,’’ or spirits, closed the rock when they emerged. These spirits, according to Algonquian tribes, had the power to enter rock and exchange tobacco for medicine.
The tales these characters tell — parables or creation stories, perhaps — were deeply significant to the people who began making the carvings about 5,000 years ago, and the site still is considered powerful by their modern descendants. Yet they’re stories no one knows how to read.
That makes the Jeffers Petroglyphs an intriguing mystery. Even seeing the carvings is difficult; in broad sunlight, they tend to fade into the stone.
It's easy to see why the Plains Indians saw the Great Spirit at work in a far corner of Minnesota.
Amid an ocean of tall grass, a fractured pile of hard red rock suddenly erupts from the sod. It's Sioux quartzite, once sand at the edge of a red ocean, cooked and pressed into marble-like stone over a billion years. Beneath the quartzite is a thin seam of a softer stone, a red, hardened clay that's barely harder than a fingernail.
This is pipestone, mined for centuries by people of many tribes, who carved into effigies and pipes called calumets, whose
smoke carried messages to the Great Spirit.
As the afternoon sun beat down on Mankato's Land of Memories Park, the drumming began.
Into a circle ringed by bleachers came dancers carrying sacred eagle staffs, honoring the memory of 38 Dakota warriors hanged nearby in 1862. Other dancers carried flags, one honoring the military veterans who are venerated in Indian culture. After them came the men's traditional dancers, wearing turkey-feather bustles and perhaps a bone breastplate, using a controlled, heel-to-toe step. Then came the fancy dancers, in a whirl of color and spinning leaps; grass dancers, with streamers swaying; and young women in jingle dresses.
It was the second year I'd come to the Mdewakanton Mah-kato Wacipi in Mankato. Even so, as I watched the proceedings and listened hard to the voices crackling over the PA, I could hear Sherlock Holmes' admonishment to the dim-witted Watson echoing in my ears: "You see, but you do not observe.''
Just 15 minutes from the tourist playground of Galena, a young woman scrubs a cast-iron pot with a corncob.
Another woman sews the ticking for a straw mattress. Over an open fire, a man carefully pours molten lead into a mold, which he opens to reveal a shiny new musket ball.
Today, the village of Elizabeth, Ill., sits on U.S. 20, the well-trod path that brings hordes of Chicagoans to this picturesque corner of Illinois, across the Mississippi River from Dubuque.
Along an international border, it's surprising how much difference a few yards can make.
To many Minnesotans, the stretch of Rainy River between Baudette and International Falls is beyond boondocks. It's beautiful —the highway that hugs it is the most scenic part of the 191-mile Waters of the Dancing Sky Scenic Byway — but it's far off the beaten path. The Minnesota Historical Society closed its Grand Mound Historic Site there, and Franz Jevne State Park is visited so infrequently the DNR doesn't staff it.
But for Canadians, this is well-traversed land. Their nation's fortunes grew with the traders who traveled this river, and their towns are clustered along the border.
In 1805, while Lewis and Clark were making history on the Missouri River, another explorer was heading up the Mississippi.
Sent by a general who was a double agent for Spain, 26-year-old Lt. Zebulon Pike was assigned to find sites for forts, determine the source of the Mississippi, make peace between warring tribes and stop unlicensed British trade on land just acquired by the Americans.
He did find a fort site on 500-foot bluffs in Iowa, but it was scrapped for a more practical site across the river in Prairie du Chien, Wis. He found the site that became Fort Snelling, though it already was well known to traders. He identified Leech Lake — as the source of the Mississippi.
In the 17th century, when Europeans began to flee religious and economic oppression, the New World was not an untouched wilderness.
In the wooded forests beyond Lake Superior, the Dakota and Ojibwe tapped maple trees for sugar, harvested wild rice and hunted the abundant game. Many of them cultivated crops and lived in villages, like the Europeans. They were careful stewards of the land, reseeding rice beds and maintaining healthy soil through controlled burns, just as state agencies do today.
For the Dakota and Ojibwe, this already was the land of the free. (For differences between the tribes, see "Ojibwe or Chippewa,
Dakota or Sioux?'' below.)