Indian Medicine Tree

Dakota speakers called the hackberry yamnumnugapi, from the verb to crunch, because animals crunch its berries. Melvin Gilmore set the name down in 1919 in his study of plant uses along the Missouri for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Dakota cooks pounded the berries fine, seeds and all, to season meat, and when they first saw ground black pepper they named it for the hackberry: the white man's yamnumnugapi. The bronze names a state department and college students as the tree's rescuers, and the people who regarded it as medicine only as the Indians.

What the plaque says

Indian Medicine Tree This tree, regarded as "medicine" by the Indians, a scrawny hackberry, growing out of a rock, near Bois Cache Creek, soon to be lost to rising waters of Oahe Lake, on April 12, 1963 was rescued in a joint enterprise of the S. D. Dept. of History and D. W. U. students and taken to the campus of Dakota Wes- leyan University. Erected 1963 by S. D. Dept. of History

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Corn Palace — 1.2 mi
  The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.
• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 2.9 mi
  A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.

More markers nearby

• Carl Gunderson: 11th Governor of South Dakota — 1.2 mi
• Old Mill Stone — 1.2 mi
• Firesteel — 2.6 mi
• Original Site of New Home Lutheran Church — 7.1 mi