The [ce-currenffi of Minnesota - Uphaw. 55 



pushed aofainsfc that from the northeast along this line of morainic 

 deposits in Inver Grove, Mendota and Reserve, and at the east 

 border of Minneapolis. The junction of the margins of the ice- 

 fields moving from the northeast and from the west was in Inver 

 Grove, close east of Westcott station ; and the waters produced by 

 the melting of the ice were now conveyed to this point b}- the 

 converging slopes of its surface, just as they had before been prin- 

 cipally discharjjed at the angle formed in the ice-margin at Crys- 

 tal lake u\ Burnsville, when the ice of this epoch had its maximum 

 extent. From these two points of its terminal moraine, namely, 

 Crystal lake and Inver Grove , very remarkable channels are found 

 extending southeastward, which evidently once carried an immense 

 volume of water but which are now dry. 



The first of these channels is crossed by the road that leads 

 southwest from Rosemount, in sections 2 and '6. Lakeville. The 

 bed of this channel is a level plain of sand and fine gravel at least 

 25 to 30 feet deep, as shown by wells, and extending here a mile 

 and a half in width, this expanse br'ing commonly known as the 

 "low prairie." On its northeast side it is bounded by a steep ter- 

 race-like escarpment of gravel and sand, 30 or 40 feet high, from 

 the top of which a similarly flat plain, called in this vicinity the 

 *'high prairie," composed of the same modified drift, stretches 

 eastward through Lebanon, Rosemount, and the north part of 

 Empire and Vermillion, to the Vermillion river, and beyond that 

 stream through Marshan and Ravenna to the Mississippi. This 

 belt of modified drift, three to five miles wide and more than 

 twenty miles in length from west to east, forming a flat plain with 

 a slope descending about 100 feet toward the east in this distance, 

 is the sediment deposited by the floods from the glacial melting, 

 chiefly discharged from the ice-covered area in Inver Grove, at 

 (crystal lake and at Lakeville lake. 



After the floods that spread this extensive plain of gravel and 

 sand had been so diminished that they could no longer cover all 

 its surface and add to its thickness by further deposition, the 

 volume of water still poured from the dissolving ice-sheet was 

 sutficient to cut in this plain the broad channel called the *Mow 

 prairie." This has a width of about one mile at the ea^t end of 

 Crystal lake, and it widens to one and a half miles, as stated, in 

 the northeast part of Lakeville. It continues with nearly the 

 same f«\itures soutluMistward to the Vermillion river clos^^ cast of 



