Artesian Wells in North and South Dakota. 377 



The quantities of alkaline matter and salt are sufficient to 

 give the water a brackish taste, rendering it unpalatable for drink- 

 ing and unfit for ordinary domestic uses; but it is drank freely 

 by cattle and horses, with no unfavorable effects. These dissolved 

 mineral ingredients seem to have been derived from the Creta- 

 ceous shales, and probably in part from beds in the Dakota 

 formation, with which the water has been in contact during its 

 slow percolation hundreds of miles through the sandstone. Thev 

 are the same in kind and similar in amount with the mineral 

 matter of Devil's lake, concentrated by evaporation without out- 

 let from the water of inflowing streams and springs, which bring 

 very small amounts of these salts dissolved from the drift and 

 Cretaceous shale of the adjoining country. 



Much shale, gravel and detritus, rich in sulphates, are present 

 in the glacial drift over nearly the entire Red river basin, and the 

 percolating rain-water, found by the fresh artesian wells in the 

 drift of the southern and northern ends of the Red river valley, 

 has acquired minute quantities of alkaline and saline matter. 

 But where its proportion is large, as in the brackish water of the 

 wells from Crookston and Blanchard northward to the edge of 

 Manitoba, it seems impossible that so remarkable a difference can 

 be due to diversity in the material of the drift, or to longer time 

 and better opportunity afforded to the water for such impregna- 

 tion while percolating through porous beds or veins in the drift. 

 The saline and alkaline artesian waters of the drift, gravel and 

 sand along this central portion of the Red river valley therefore 

 appear to be received mainly from the same Dakota sandstone 

 which supplies the deep weljs of the James river valley. 



Several wells in the vicinity of Blanchard and Mayville, 375 

 to 404 feet in depth, pass through the drift and enter a very fine 

 white sandstone, probably the Dakota formation, from which they 

 obtain flows of brackish water. About a dozen miles east of 

 Blanchard the drift was found to have a total thickness of 310 

 feet below which a boring went 107 feet into exceedingly 

 fine white sandstone, finding, however, no artesian water, appar- 

 ently because of the very close texture of the rock. The top of 

 the sandstone in these wells is 650 to 575 feet above the sea. If 

 it is the Dakota sandstone, as seems probable, it has an ascent of 

 about 600 feet in 75 miles east from the meridian of Devil's lake 

 and Jamestown, rising in its approach toward the Silurian, Cam- 



