344 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OP 



under the skeleton and about 2 feet lower down, they found upon the sur- 

 face of what the miners call "red rock," the trunk, limbs and roots of a small 

 pine tree, identical in all respects with the red pine (P. variabilis) of the adja- 

 cent slopes ; the bark appeared charred and blackened, the wood was light, 

 yellow and apparently sound, showing the fibrous woody structure, the knots, 

 the annual rings of growth, identical with variabalis : on exposure to air, how- 

 ever, it soon became soft and crumbled, more like rotten, or water soaked wood. 

 The roots and limbs appeared as if violently compressed or forced in the seams 

 of the underlying rock. There, then, was a point conclusively shown, namely, 

 that prior to the cause which covered Soda Hill, Soda Bar and Dry Diggings 

 Hill with its enormous beds of gravel, sand and boulders, and its native gold, 

 (which is eveiywhere sought for in this locality, from the lowest points of 

 Payne's and Illinois Bars, 2\ feet above Clear Creek up to the highest points 

 where it can availably be mined and hauled to water) man roved and dwelt in 

 this region, timber grew, and everything requisite to furnish food to mankind 

 and the brute creation must have flourished in proximity. Here then we have, 

 within the period of man, evidence that either the convulsions which caused 

 the emergence of the Rocky Mountain range in Western Kansas is a very late 

 geological phenomenon, or that some sudden cause, the upheaval per- 

 haps of the higher Central range, through the metamorphic granite, the talc 

 and mica slates of the lower Eastern ranges of the Rocky Mountains, scooped 

 out the low interior mountain basin in which the Gregory, Russell, Nevada, 

 Lake and other gulches now mined and populated are located ; and that then, 

 as the floods, be they of mud, water, or snow and ice, caused by the disturbed 

 equilibrium of the older chain of mountains, by the sudden emptying of Moun- 

 tain Lakes perhaps, or by the sudden melting of snows and deluges of rain, 

 then subsided, and the vast fissures through which Clear Creek now finds its 

 way into the Platte gave way to the pent up waters ; then perhaps the receding 

 waters, still carrying a vast amount of detritus as the waters subsided, left them 

 in their present location. Indeed, one is at once surprised at the location of 

 the so-called Pike's Peak Gold Mines of Gregory and Clear ('reek. 



After looking over a lofty mountain road for 16 miles, we descend from 1000 

 to 2000 feet into an interior mountain basin, surrounded on all sides by mountain 

 ranges of much greater altitude, and through which but one avenue has been 

 opened, where Clear Creek or Vasquez^Fork of Platte river finds its way into 

 the vast prairies extending from the foor of the mountains to the Missouri river. 

 Perhaps it may be urged that glacial phenomena may account for this anoma- 

 lous fact. In answer we can say that, from the evidence before us, the climactic 

 condition of the present time, carried out by the identity of the long buried 

 flora of the period when this convulsion took place with the one now in ex- 

 istence, forbid us from supposing that the Central range (or Snowy range, more 

 commonly so-called.) was ever the seat of Glaciers large or extensive enough 

 to cause phenomena at all adequate to explain the changes and erosions now 

 so plainly seen in the valley of Vasquez Fork, or in the upper mining region. 

 The lofty summits of Long's and Pike's Peaks, the intermediate lofty chain, the 

 high mountains between Clear Creek and Bear Creek, although they retain in 

 places deposits of snow and small beds of ice, yet nothing is ever found upon 

 them answering the appearance of constant glaciers, whose accretion in cold 

 summers and diminution in warm summers write upon the bare mountain 

 peaks a history of their force and continued action. As a proof of the recent 

 date of the convulsions that have in ages'past furrowed and torn up the Plu- 

 tonic rocks of the east side of the range, that have upreared the tertiary strata 

 at the foot of the mountains, until their almost perpendicular strata form a 

 secondary valley parallel with the valley of the South Platte and has spread 

 over the vast plains of the Platte and Kansas Rivers, the boulders, gravel and 

 sand formed of Feldspathic granite, it is interesting and valuable, and may 

 be a guide, a clew to the solution of the question by which the valley of the 

 Platte, the interior prairie of South Park, the complete want, over a vast ex- 



[Nov. 



