The red men are gone; the great forest is no more; railroads and cities and farms occupy the bottom of the “Old Sea Bed.” But the same courage and hardihood and clean living which marked the pioneers of near a half century ago is still the hope of America.
Charles Allen McConnell.
Kansas City, Mo., October, 1913.
CHAPTER I
IN THE BED OF AN ANCIENT SEA
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.