Boys of the Old Sea Bed
Tales of Nature and Adventure
9781465638175
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Men of science who have made a study of the earth’s surface, say that Lake Erie, from which flows Niagara river northward into Lake Ontario, will, in a certain, or uncertain, number of years, go dry, and what is now a wide though shallow sheet of water become a plain, through which may meander a slowly-flowing river. The reason for this prediction is that Niagara Falls, which have cut their way back from Lewiston through a gorge some seven miles, and are still eating their way through the limestone and the softer underlying shale at the rate of more than two feet a year, will finally accomplish their journey, and the great lake be reached and drained. A similar event seems really to have occurred in the past history of the earth near the geographical center of the state of Wisconsin. Draw a line through the center of the map of this state, from north to south, and then another from east to west, at a little more than one-third of the way up from the southern boundary, and at the intersection you will have the location of the lower end of what appears to have been an ancient lake, or inland sea. The eastern boundary, evidently, was a range of hills some forty miles to the east, along whose sides, fifty years ago, were easily recognized traces of successive diminishing shore lines, in rows of water-worn pebbles and shells. The southern boundary is marked by sandstone bluffs, which bear the fantastic carving of waves. Rising nearly perpendicular from the sands like the front of some gigantic ramparts of a fortress, an hundred or more feet, the upper portions are fashioned into turrets, bastions, and domes, until at a distance it is difficult to believe that one is not looking upon some mighty work of man. Here and there, many miles apart, huge granite rocks rear their heads hundreds of feet above the plain—islands of the old sea. Of course caves abound in these water-worn bluffs, and these were found, in the early days of settlement, to be the homes and hiding places of bears, wolves, panthers, and the even more dreaded “Indian-devil,” or northern lynx. Not infrequently they were utilized for temporary human habitation. Indeed, one of these very caves became the last hiding place of Black Hawk, the famous Indian chief, as he sought escape from the white man after the failure of the war he had waged, like his predecessor, Tecumseh, in hope of uniting the various tribes against the crowding, appropriating paleface. Near the present city of Kilbourn, at what is known as the Delles, the Wisconsin river breaks through the rocky barrier and pours its foaming flood down a narrow gorge that is only exceeded in size, and not at all in wild beauty and grandeur, by the gorge and rapids below Niagara. The falls have worn their way through, but evidently, here was the Niagara of the ancient sea.
