Sixteenth Annual meeting. 21 



The green sand and green shale almost entirely disappeared, the valley of the Prairie 

 Dog was cut out about to its present depth, and a long submergence filled it all up with 

 the irregular beds of the Miocene. 



Xi>. 6. Above the Miocene is a bed of chalky, sandy marl, which everywhere gives to 

 the high prairie a long rolling slope. In the southeast of the county it thins off, and in 

 high places we have a sedentary soil of the Miocene. But this sandy marl is the stratum 

 that covers more surface area than all the others together. It is formed mainly of the 

 detritus of cretaceous rocks plus the sand of the Miocene. It contains everywhere chalk 

 nodules, which appear to have acquired their form from fossils which no longer till them. 

 In one place, south of Edmund, where this formation rests on the chalk, it seems to be a 

 layer of it, so full is it of fragments of haploscapha and ostrea congesta. This bed is in 

 Norton county probably nowhere more than 100 feet thick now, but its thickness as a 

 deposit must have been much greater. It lies erosively unconformably on the Miocene, 

 yellow chalk and blue shale. The evidence is manifold, that after the Miocene was laid 

 there was a long period of upheaval and erosion, during which the valleys of the main 

 streams, the larger creeks, and even the smaller ravines were eroded out, and after that 

 a submergence which allowed our No. to fill up again from the bed of the Prairie Dog 

 to the highest top of the high prairie and beyond; and then another elevation of the 

 continent started the streams nearly on the old lines, and the cutting-out has now about 

 reached the depth it was before, but not the area — for we find this last deposit resting 

 on one side of small ravines, while the other is an escarpment of Miocene. It forms the 

 second bottom of the Prairie Dog, and the alluvium of the first bottom is mainly made 

 up of its materials. It forms the second bottom of the upper Solomon. As far east as 

 Cawker City it forms the third bottom. It lies against the sides of chalk bluffs whose 

 eroded surfaces have their hollows filled with Miocene grit. This is the Pliocene, which 

 has so long figured in our Kansas geological sketches and maps, in which was hidden 

 the Miocene before described. It is probably the Equus beds of further north and west, 

 and it may be that it is of Pleistocene age. We have found only three bones that 

 we are confident belong to this formation, but there are others about which the proba- 

 bility is great. This formation makes the smooth prairie of this and other counties, and 

 to it the buffalo grass is most strongly attached. When it is eroded, the bunches of wire- 

 grass get a hold in sedentary soil of the Miocene and in the flints of the upper chalk. 

 Tli is has occurred extensively south of the Solomon, though thick masses of it still but- 

 tress the chalk bluffs of that river. 



No. 7. Is alluvium. Of this we shall say little. Its area is small, as the valleys are 

 all narrow. Besides containing buffalo and other modern remains, it sometimes gives 

 up a fragment of turtle shell, or a bone of a mastodon, brought from the Tertiary for- 

 mations. There are three northern tributaries of the Solomon, named Sand creek, be- 

 cause the alluvium is entirely sand, formed from the breaking-down of the Tertiary bluffs, 

 the Miocene here being more sandy than elsewhere. In these three creeks, the water 

 disappears below the beds of sand for spaces varying from a quarter to a whole mile. 



We must now refer briefly to the dip of the strata. It is scarcely possible to recognize 

 any dip in the Tertiary formations. We thought we could partially do so at Monk's 

 Canon. Of the Cretaceous strata, (including the green shale,) there were only six places 

 where we could fairly see the dip, or rather see that there was a decided dip, for in only 

 two or three places could we get a section at right angles to the dip. The observations 

 at these half-dozen places gave us a little start. The dip was not in the direction we ex- 

 pected for Kansas. In five out of the six places it was decidedly southeast — or a little 

 more south than east. In the blue shale on West Sand creek, we got a fine exposure, 

 and by the courtesy of Mr. Trescott, County Surveyor, we were enabled to take observa- 

 tions with instruments, and measured 195 feet of length, in which we got a dip of 14 



