Spirit Mound

A real Native legend and a documented 1804 Lewis & Clark visit

Spirit Mound is a lone grassy hill rising from the plain a few miles north of Vermillion, South Dakota, beside Route 19. Geologically it is a knob of the lower Niobrara Chalk that the Ice Age glaciers failed to grind away. To the peoples of the region it has always been far more than that: a place where the natural and supernatural worlds meet.

Its stories are many. For the Yankton it is the home of the Can O'ti na, the Little Tree Dwellers or Little People. In Lakota tradition the trickster Iktomi persuaded the Raccoon people to change their nature, and two altered raccoon children became the Can O'ti la, upright mischief-makers who led men astray, later turned into spirit helpers; the mound is the origin of the Lakota's Little Tree Dweller medicine bundle, still in use today. For the Mandan it is where Lone Man saved their ancestors from a great flood and where their sacred Turtle Drums were made. The Lakota also tell of 350 warriors who came near the mound late one night and were nearly wiped out by the Little People.

In August 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped with a band of Sioux near the mouth of the Vermillion River and heard about the hill. Lewis wrote that the "deavals" who lived there were about 18 inches tall, with very large heads, and carried sharp arrows that could strike at great distance, and that the Omaha, Otoe and Sioux would not go near it. On 25 August, a stiflingly hot day, Lewis, Clark and ten men marched about nine miles north to see for themselves. They found no little people. From the top, they saw for the first time the sweep of the Great Plains, grassland and open prairie full of bison and elk, which they called a most beautiful landscape.

Spirit Mound is now one of very few places where anyone can stand exactly where Lewis and Clark stood, because the Missouri River dams built after the Flood Control Act of 1944 drowned most of their campsites. Settlers arrived in 1868 and grazed and farmed it, and by the early 1980s five owners held pieces of the site, dotted with more than 20 buildings, a feedlot, crop fields and five miles of fence. A local Spirit Mound Trust fought from 1986 to save it, and in 2001 federal money bought 320 acres, now Spirit Mound Historic Prairie, a state park. The prairie is being restored, a slow job of decades, and the trail to the summit is a National Recreation Trail. Some Native leaders have questioned treating a sacred and fearsome place as a destination for fun.