HISTORICAL SKETCH. 57 



1835, Featherstonhaugh.] 



" mouth of the St. Francis, or Parallel, river, a considerable stream running 

 parallel with the Mississippi, and navigable for canoes 150 miles." The 

 Rum river, on the same side, is said to be navigable for canoes 150 miles to 

 " Mil Lac, a lake almost as large as Cass lake." 



The whole descent at the falls of St. Anthony, including the rapids, he 

 estimated at eighty feet, the perpendicular fall at eighteen feet. 



LIEUT. ALLEN ON THE ST. CKOIX RIVER. 



The St. Croix enters the Mississippi by a mouth seventy-five yards broad, opposite an island 

 of the latter, and fifty miles below Fort Snelling. Its right bank at the mouth is a perpendicular 

 rock eight or ten feet high (calcareous sandrock) and the left is a low acute point. A few 

 hundred yards from the mouth it opens into a long, narrow lake, lake St. Croix, which seems to 

 fill or lie in a valley, the hills rising to form its banks, on each side, in green gentle slopes. * 



* A few miles above where I encamped, the river is traversed by a primitive rock 

 which for a distance of one or two hundred yards, confines the channel within perpendicular 

 walls fifty feet high, and rises in a high abrupt little island in the middle of the stream, but 

 occasions no rapid. Above this the banks are high and steep, but not rocky, till within a mile of 

 the falls, when the channel becomes suddenly contracted to from fifteen to thirty yards, by rocks 

 forming mural precipices on each side fifty and a hundred feet high, between which the river, 

 though very deep, is urged with great velocity. This rock and the narrow channel continues, 

 with a few interruptions of caves and fissures, one mile up, to the falls, where the river is but 

 forty feet broad, and rushes with great force and violence down a fall of fifty feet in three 

 hundred yards. The whole of this rock is greenstone trap, and its surface presented to the river 

 in high cliffs is exceedingly rugged and broken, prismatic fragments being continually detached 

 from it and tumbled down. 



In the further ascent of the St. Croix river to the upper St. Croix lake, 

 Lieut. Allen encountered great difficulties, on account of being abandoned 

 by Mr. Schoolcraft and his party, and on account of the almost intermina- 

 ble rapids. His description of this stream above the falls of St. Croix con- 

 firms Duluth's assertion as quoted by La Salle, that in descending it he 

 "had passed forty leagues of rapids.' 1 



G. W. FEATHERSTONHAUGH, TJ. 8. GEOLOGIST. 



In the summers of 1834 and 1835, an English gentleman, under the title 

 of U. S. Geologist, was commissioned by Col. J. J. Abert, of the bureau of 

 topographical engineers, with loose and apparently aimless instructions, to 

 execute rambling explorations in the western country. The first year he 

 visited the Red river of Arkansas, and the second he proceeded to the 

 vicinity of that 'elevated ridge which separates the Missouri river from the 

 St. Peter's. From the latter expedition resulted two works one entitled 

 " Report of a geological reconnoissance made in 1835, from the seat of govern- 



