The Central States and Great Lakes
knives and belted up their axes, for to this place the Great Spirit came to kill and eat the buffalo, and it is the blood of this animal that has turned the stone to red. Here, too, the Thunder Bird had her nest, and her brood rent the skies above it with the clashing of their iron wings.
A snake having crawled into this nest to steal the unhatched thunders, Manitou caught up a piece of pipestone, hastily pressed it between his hands, giving it the shape of a man, and flung it at the reptile. The stone man's feet stuck fast in the ground, and there he stood for a thousand years, growing like a tree and drawing strength and knowledge out of the earth. Another shape grew up beside him—woman. In time the snake gnawed them free from their foundations and the red-earth pair wandered off together. From them sprang all people.
Ages after, the Manitou called the red men to the quarry, fashioned a pipe for them, told them it was a part of their flesh, and smoked it over them, blowing the smoke to north, south, east, and west, in token that wherever the influence of the pipe ex- tended there was to be brotherhood and peace. The place was to be sacred from war and they were to make their pipes from this rock. As the smoke rolled about him he gradually disappeared from view. At the last whiff the ashes fell out and the surface of the rock for miles burst into flame, so that it melted and glazed. Two ovens opened at its foot, and through the fire entered the two spirits
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