A marker indicating the Original Site for the “Medicine Rock” near Highway 212 near the Missouri River was dedicated on August 21st, 1954.
The forty-ton prayer rock served as a common landmark near the Missouri River. But the construction of the Oahe Dam and resulting Lake Oahe threatened to inundate the rock. So it was relocated 12 miles east to the town of Gettysburg.
South Dakota is not a place that typically has huge boulders sitting next to a river, but this unique rock was found near the mouth of the Little Cheyenne River—where the town of Forest City was founded in 1883. Known as the Medicine Rock, it measures about eighteen feet long by ten feet wide and weighs an estimated forty tons.
The rock appears to be a glacial boulder deposited by ice when the glacier moved south across North America. Samples were taken from it in 1994, and a geologist determined that the rock had been formed elsewhere but had settled in South Dakota between 350 and 400 million years ago
The rock contains man-made markings of human footprints, the carving of a hand, and also the tracks of a bear. One theory says the Medicine Rock’s prints were formed as stories were passed down orally from generation to generation. A bear chased the Native American man toward the Missouri River. He came across a large rock and tried to escape by running across it. The belief is that as the man ran across the rock, leaving his footprints and handprints embedded for history to see, the Great Spirit picked him up and rescued him from the bear.
The Boulder was relocated again in 1989 when it was moved to a new home at the Dakota Sunset Museum in Gettysburg.
Production help is provided by Brad Tennant, Dakota Wesleyan University.