It wasn't upkept--I'll say that much. The grass could have used a bit of a trim maybe, but the city is keeping it up adequately, as well they should. It sits on plot of ground at the very top of Prospect Hill, where once a library full of history was created. The Prospect Hill Monument attempts to remember just one event years and years ago.
If you stand up beside it, walk over to the edge of cliff, the view is extraordinary--all business.
That's the Missouri River and I-29. It's quite magnificent really, but it looks nothing at all like what it must have in 1869, save the Missouri River maybe, although back then Old Muddy was almost certainly more braided and far, far less drawn and quartered.
Back then, Sioux City was but a few hundred souls strong, barely established, a time when three big-hearted missionaries full of eternal designs determined to leave the settlement around Prospect Hill for the huge, unconquered west. Their names? Sheldon Jackson, T.C. Cleland and J.C. Elliott, strict Presbyterians all. The three of them put themselves on a great and grand mission, whose opening volleys began here with a community-wide prayer meeting for them "to win the west for Christ."
Fifty-some years later, in 1923, thoughtfully pious Presbyterians determined to honor the commissioning that took place here in 1869 with some Godly commemoration, so they put good money into the monument that today sits on an oddly cut parcel of ground, high--high!--above the city and the river that created it.
The only way to get to the place, by the way, is a map or a GPS. There is no signage really. The monument itself isn't what you might call stunning. It's big, not huge. It was built in the golden age of monuments, but both itself and what it commemorates seems little more than a footnote today. Read it for yourself. 
Just to be sure, it identifies the three missionaries, then describes them thusly: "pioneer missionaries who on April 29, 1869 from this hill top viewed the great unchurched areas and after prayer went out to win the west for Christ."
A formidable task, prayers or no prayers, and so genuinely American. Prospect Hill stood, back then, high above a small river town that had begun to see itself as the jumping off place, the kind of "last stop" for whatever the flood of settlers bound required for the big trip west. Some, of course, had no particular interest in winning the west for Christ. They felt themselves called to a similar task with a differing end--to win the west for themselves and their pocketbooks.
Right here, in 1874, a rowdy newspaper editor named Charles Collins began a nationwide crusade to round up a thousand people--as many as he could enlist anyway--to move out to the Black Hills with them, thereby flouting the law. The Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 had, after all, granted the Black Hills to the sole possession of the Great Sioux Nation. But Collins' had gold on the brain and in his soul, as most of us do. Custer's trip out there had made it clear the Black Hills had gold; he and his recruits wanted it.
Those two missions to win the west went to war in a hundred small towns and mining camps that grew from the prospects of a great, unexplored frontier out there to the west, an unimaginably huge land filled, they presumed, with little more than opportunity.
In the middle of the 20th century, the soft sandstone beneath Prospect Hill got worn away by wind and rain, putting the monument at risk. So it was moved to where it stands today, some fifty feet from the overlook.
It's an amazing place really, a little obscure sliver of land amid a handful of houses that, mostly, have seen their better days. Once, only the wealthy could afford a place on Prospect Hill. That time passed long ago.
Don't ask me to recommend the place. For reasons I'm still trying to determine in my own heart and soul, the old monument and its neighborhood left me freeling, well, sad. I wish that weren't so.
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