Medicine Rock State Historic Site
Stanton, North Dakota, United States
A sandstone outcrop on the Missouri River bluffs carrying bison-effigy and human-figure carvings held significant in regional Plains Indian tradition.
Medicine Rock is a sandstone outcrop above the Knife River Indian Villages country, its surface carrying carved figures: bison in motion, human forms, the graphic vocabulary of the Plains peoples who made and renewed them. Regional tradition holds the rock as a place of power and prayer, and the site's documentation by the State Historical Society of North Dakota records that significance without trespassing on it.
The carvings are among the surviving examples of a rock-art tradition that once ran along the Missouri; weathering and time have taken many, and the site's listing on the National Register protects what remains. As a sacred site it belongs to the communities whose ancestors made it; the state's interpretive care is the custodial form of that.
Visiting
Near Stanton ND, reachable off ND 31; see the SHSND site. Approach as heritage ground: look, do not touch the carvings, no rubbings.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMedicine_Rock_with_railings.jpg), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories