210 



The surface of the terrace at the viUage of Bridgeton stands at 554 feet A. 

 T., but slopes gently upward toward the bluff, where it reaches within 

 25-30 feet of the top. Below Bridgeton the valley widens to 1^ miles and 

 is bounded by bluffs 75 feet high, with many blunt salient and re-entrant 

 angles. (Fig. 13.) In this part of its course the Raccoon has cut in the 

 valley floor a flood plain 5-15 feet below the general level. It is heavily 

 loaded and at low- water wanders through a wide belt of sand bars and 

 islands. (Fig. 14). At Rosedale the valley widens to three miles and, 

 continuing to the southwest, opens into the Wabash Valley, as described in 

 another paper. But the stream, turning abruptly to the northwest, leaves 

 this valley and enters another which narrows at ("oxville to less than one- 

 quarter of a mile. Thence it maintains a width of about a half mile to its 

 emergence through the Wabash bluff at Armiesburg. The lower Raccoon 

 Valley is bounded by blulTs 1 bi-l."(> feet high. At Mecca a narrow alluvial 

 terrace on the west side is 40 feet high and one mile long. A little below 

 Mecca a similar terrace begins on the east side and continues to the mouth 

 of Leatherwood Creek. The gap in the Wabash bluff through which the 

 Raccoon-Leatheiwood stream passes is 1* miles wide and blocked by the 

 Montc«uma terrace 50 feet high. The cut through the terrace is only 750 

 feet wide. (Fig. 3C.) 



The abnormalities of the Raccoon present many interesting problems. 

 Obviously, the middle Raccoon Valley once transmitted a stream as large 

 as White River directly to the Wabash below Atherton Island. The course 

 of its tributaries, Little Raccoon, iron Preek and les.'-er streams are wholly 

 abnormal to the present course of the lower Raccoon and accordant only 

 with a trunk stream flowing southwest to the Wabash. Where did a river 

 of such mngnitiKh^ come iroinV Tlic iiriscnt upper Raccoon was only a 

 modest tributary to it. The cul-de-sac above ]\lansfield points to a possible 

 and I thlTik probable .inswer. The iireglacial Rac<'oon was a large river 

 with a course of hundreds of miles and a basin second in extent to no other 

 tributary of the Wabash. What is left of its valley begins two miles above 

 Mansfleld, when- it is filled and obliterated by the Shelbyville moraine 

 which lies across it, and by the Wiscoiisiu drift sheet which stretches away 

 to Canada. No effort to tr.ice the valley east of the Mansfield cul-de-sac 

 has been made. Such an effort would probably be fruitless for lack of 

 well borings. 



The ridge across the valley at Mansfield seems at one jwint to be 



