Blue Mounds

The granite (quartzite) cliff above is in Blue Mounds State Park.  The Southwest Minnesota park is mostly prairie and hosts one of the only Bison herds in the state.  I came across the picture and the article quoted below while planning next summer’s trip.

[From a piece written by Chris Welsch]

In the realm of legends, Blue Mounds has plenty, as a local poet once told me. The first time I visited the park, in 1994, I went to Luverne to see the Hinkly House, a stately Victorian home built of Sioux quartzite by the quarry owner. There I met a tiny, elderly woman in pearls and a blue windbreaker. Carmen Christensen had lived near Blue Mounds for most of her life. When she heard I was a writer, she took my arm and asked if I'd like to hear a poem she'd written in 1944. Then she closed her eyes and recited in a strong and steady voice:

Proudly rising above the plain,
Immune to sun and wind and rain,
These scattered rocks and towering wall,
Like silent witnesses, recall
The history and ancient lore
Of ages vanished long before.
Here are legends carved in stone
That, once, forgotten men had known.
The rocks would tell you if they could,
What happened where they long have stood:
How frightful monsters roamed this place;
When first they saw the human race;
How once the red men with great cunning
Started herds of bison running
Over their cliffs to death below,
Where heaps of bleaching bones would show.
But all the secrets they have known
Are safely kept with tongues of stone.