Small Wonder(s)--Pilot Rock

Long, long ago, in the ancient past, a massive chunk of pink quartzite got left behind in the immense wash of an turbulent inland sea. It's impossible to imagine a rock that large--20-feet high, 40-feet wide, 60-feet long--getting pushed or carted anywhere, but that's what happened. Something of an ocean swept that huge rock south and east from its moorings up on the outcropping pink quartzite of Gitche Manitou or Pipestone. The glacier quite handily picked it up and then unceremoniously left it behind.

Sort of sad really. Once upon a time, Pilot Rock, all hundreds of tons of it, got orphaned on the northwest Iowa plains. Geologists call it a "glacial erractic," which is to say an oddity, which it was and still is. There it sits up on a hill, all by its lonesome.

You might think it hard to miss something that big on open land, but it isn't. Pilot Rock is private property. Thus, you can see it only from afar. It's atop a hill overlooking the Little Sioux River just a couple miles south of Cherokee. The county is kind enough to keep up a little park that sits just off highway 59--picnic table right there if you pack a sandwich. Pull over, get out of the car, and look up the hill to the east. There it sits, that huge glacial erratic all by itself, one skinny sympathetic sidekick tree beside it.  

It's just sort of sad. 

But, as always, there's a story. 

For centuries, Pilot Rock was just that, a rock that acted like a pilot to generations of our aboriginals. The only available maps for hundreds of years were rivers: you had to learn to read them to know your way around. But here and there were these goofy oddities too, big, forlorn glacial erratics. On the endless plains of northwest Iowa plains, long before there was a town named Cherokee, if you were in sight of Pilot Rock, you knew where you were. Breathe easy and sleep well. It's a sweet story. 

There's more. Some Cherokee-ans will be happy to point you at a book by America's first popular novelist, James Fennimore Cooper of Last of the Mohicans fame. It a stretch, but give those Cherokee-ans an ear because they claim Pilot Rock has a distinguished presence in Cooper's novel The Plains, and they'll be more than happy to give you chapter and verse. Hearken to the voice of James Fennimore Cooper: 

Amid the monotonous rolling of the prairie, a single naked and ragged rock arose on the margin of a little watercourse, which found its way, after winding a vast distance through the plains, into one of the numerous tributaries of the Father of Rivers.

That "single and naked rock" appears in chapter 8, if you don't trust them or me. Pilot Rock becomes a rest stop for the ragamuffin Ishmael Bush and his a covered-wagon gang of pioneers looking for a life on the frontier. 

Sometime around the time of the Civil War, white folks started drifting into valley of the Little Sioux, and when they did, they started chipping away at Pilot Rock, looking for stone for their foundations. A James Fennimore Cooper nut, a man named Riggs from way out east in New Jersey, determined that the rock James Fennimore Cooper had made famous in The Prairie should not and would not suffer such sacrilege, so he done bought a goodly chunk of the land around it to protect the rock from sacrilege of infidels.

Mr. Riggs from New Jersey is long gone, but Pilot Rock is still on private property. If you stop to see it, you shouldn't walk up the hill without permission. 

From down beneath especially, you can't help but feel sorry for that old chunk of quartzite. It has such an illustrious path: a beacon for lost souls looking for anything to mark their way, a rock of ages given celebrity status in the Cooper novel where the Deerslayer, that noble Native hero, is delivered at last to the happy hunting ground. 

Here's an idea. Grab a quarter-pounder from McDonalds just down the road. Maybe fries. Maybe not. Then drop by that little park, nicely kept, spread out a napkin or two, and get The Prairie up on your phone (it's public domain), turn to chapter eight, and have lunch just down the hill from that massive glacial erratic, once a lighthouse over an ocean of grass. 

Go ahead and have lunch with a pink quartzite orphan, a celebrity who was once a star.