150 
The valley floor and sides are occupied by an open, park-like forest, con- 
sisting of oak, maple, elm, beech, hickory, basswood and other trees, mostly 
from two to three feet in diameter. ‘The sinailest one is eighteen inches and 
one beech is nearly four feet. ‘The area has never been under the plow, 
and has for many years been used as a pasture. Hvicently the stream 
channel is shifting rather rapidly from side to side, and the alluvial ma- 
terial has not been deposited in thin layers over the surface, but has been 
transferred from one side of the channel to the other by lateral corrasion 
and deposit. The trees do not check the process of lateral shifting in the 
least. If the stream comes against one it undermines and tips it over as 
readily as it cuts away its bank elsewhere. There is only one tree in the 
valley more than about 100 years old and that stands near the foot of the 
bluff. Therefore the inference seems justified that a complete shifting of 
the channel from side to side and a working over of all the alluvial ma- 
terial takes place about once every century. 
The most puzzling question about this stream is the obvious one, what 
makes it so crooked? At ordinary stages it carries almost no sediment, and 
ut flood it does not appear to be overloaded except on the inside of the 
bends. The valley is straight, the flood water channel is very crooked and 
the low water channel is still more crooked. The fall of the stream in 
19C0 feet of length is seven feet, or at the rate of 19 feet per mile, and in 
the upper 1,860 feet is 22.5 feet per mile, which equals the average fall of 
the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon. The fall in the lower 600 
feet is 10.3 feet per mile. The slope of the valley floor in 1,150 feet is 32 
feet per mile, but in the upper 650 feet is 42 feet per mile. Therefore the 
stream is most crooked where the valley slope is steepest. Its law seems 
to be, the crookedness varies directly as the steepness of valley slope. This 
supports the conclusion of Jefferson that “maturely meandering streams 
may be regarded as finding their slope too steep.”? 
It works in easily eroded material and the extraordinarily crooked 
portion of it is just where it crosses the belt of sand dunes. These facts 
indicate that a temporary and local excess of load may be one of the 
factors concerned in the problem. 
1 National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 13, Page 8 
