A Fantastically Beautiful Place: The Medicine Rocks

The Roosevelt line on the second sign comes from Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, published in 1885 and finished at his Maltese Cross Ranch on the Little Missouri. He had first come west in September 1883 to hunt buffalo, riding with the guide Joe Ferris out of Gregor Lang's ranch south of Medora, and in the same book he wrote that the herds had been practically destroyed that year. Two signs stand together here: the state's geology board and the Montana Historical Society's National Register sign.

What the plaque says

A Fantastically Beautiful Place: The Medicine Rocks Medicine Rocks State Park was once a sea of sand dunes. About 61 million years ago during the Tertiary Era, a large freshwater river deposited fine-grained sands along its shores. From there, coastal winds blew the sand into dunes that eventually compacted into soft sandstone. That soft rock was especially susceptible to wind erosion, which caused hollowed out holes in the face of the rock. The Medicine Rocks exhibit crossbedding, where thin layers of sandstone lie at angles within thick sandstone beds. For millions of years, the wind has sculpted the soft sandstone into many strange and bizarre shapes that, like shifting clouds, almost overwhelm the imagination in their complexity and ability to inspire wonder. Native Americans early recognized the distinctiveness of the Medicine Rocks. They used the area as a vision quest site, meeting place, shelter, and as a lookout to spot enemies and bison. A Lakota named Charging Bear called the rocks a place "where the spirits stayed and medicine men played." Like the Native Americans before them, non-Indian settlers also recognized the uniqueness of the Medicine Rocks as a place to gather and enjoy one of Montana's geologic wonders. Inyan Oka-lo-ka / Medicine Rocks State Park Traveling through southeastern Montana in 1883, naturalist, writer, and future United States President Theodore Roosevelt was struck by what he called the Medicine Buttes. He wrote, "Altogether it was as fantastically beautiful a place as I have ever seen: it seemed impossible that the hand of man should not have had something to do with its formation." Indeed, mother nature spent millions of years crafting this landmark, but the hand of humans here cannot be ignored. Thousands of men and women recorded their history here, transforming the perforated sandstone monuments into a historical register with initials, names, dates, and images carved in soft stone. Petroglyphs of warriors and animals mark hundreds of years of use by indigenous people who harvested medicinal plants and performed ceremonies and religious rituals. The Lakota aptly named it "Inyan oka-lo-ka" or "Rock with a Hole in it." European explorers, and later trappers and traders, passed through and left their marks in the early 1800s. Gold seekers came through after 1862, and then a steady influx of cowboys, ranchers, homesteaders, laborers, and tourists left basic but rich information that often connects them with pivotal state, national, and world events. County officials maintained the Medicine Rocks as a park beginning in the 1930s, and it became a Montana state park in 1957. The vast collection of inscriptions at Medicine Rocks serve as enticing clues about the history of human occupation here, and with more research can yield volumes about the cultural traditions and family histories of its visitors. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of Interior In cooperation with the Montana Historical Society www.montanahistoricalsociety.org

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Medicine Rocks State Park — 0.6 mi
  Sandstone towers worn full of holes, holy ground to the Lakota and Cheyenne and a stone register of everyone who came after.
• Carter County Museum — 11 mi
  Montana's first county museum, built in 1936 by a ranch county to keep the dinosaurs its own ground kept giving up.

More markers nearby

• Ekalaka — 10 mi