ARCHEOLOGI€AL INVESTIGATIONS IN MISSOURI 5 



floored, and crooked, often with fine terraces and enclosed by bordering 

 bluffs. All these creeks are, or formerly were, perennial, with excellent 

 springs along their banks, and their beds are frequently rocky. Fish- 

 ing River, rising as a network of creeks mostly in Clay County, is an 

 underfit stream reexcavating a broad detritus-filled valley identified 

 with the former course of a large northerly tributary of the preglacial 

 Kansas River. The valley bottoms along all these streams consist 

 almost wholly of rich alluvium washed in from the glacial and loessial 

 deposits on the adjoining uplands, thus differing materially from the 

 partly extraneous and often sandy soils in the trench of the Missouri. 



Interfluvial areas present considerable local diversity of terrain but 

 relief nowhere exceeds 300 feet. Most strikiiig are the bluffs rising 

 abruptly from the edges of the Missouri River flood plain to heights of 

 200 feet or more, except at the mouths of side valleys. Thick loess 

 deposits form ridges paralleling the flood plain, highest east of the 

 Missouri, with progressively lower ridges discernible as one leaves the 

 valley farther behind. The valley rim has been deeply dissected, as 

 have the borders of most of the permanent tributaries, so that a rugged 

 zone 3 to 6 miles wide flanks the streams. Farther back, where post- 

 glacial erosion has not yet become so pronounced, are gently rolling 

 uplands from which long fingers extend to within a few miles of the 

 Missouri. These have been developed on loessial and glacial soils of 

 great fertility, which nearly everywhere form a thick mantle over tiie 

 underlying Pennsylvanian limestones and shales. Within the area in- 

 cluded in figure 1, the uplands are best shown in southeastern Platte 

 and western Clay Counties (maximum elevation 1,050 feet) and a few 

 miles west of the Missouri in Kansas. 



For a graphic picturization of the locality and its wildlife resources 

 as in essence it must have appeared to pre-white inhabitants, we may 

 turn to the journals of the first American exploring expedition up the 

 Missouri. Although this goes back less than a century and a half, the 

 contrast with present conditions is striking. By June 23, 1804, Lewis 

 and Clark (Thwaites, 1904a, pp. 56-64) had passed the mouth of Fish- 

 ing River, and on that day, while downriver winds held the party in 

 camp, Capt. Clark and his hunters killed two deer and a bear in what 

 is now Clay County. Clark further states: "I observed great quts. 

 [quantities] of Bear Signs, where the[y] had passed in all Directions 

 thro the bottoms in Serch of Mulberries, which were in great numbers 

 in all the bottoms thro which our party passed. . ." 



Next day the party was camped above the mouth of the Little 

 Blue, and we learn that "the countrey on each side of the river is 

 fine interspursed with Praries [prairies], in which immence herds 

 of Deer is Seen, on the banks of the river we observe numbers of 

 Deer watering and feeding on the young willow . . ." 



