WOODED EEGION ON THE EAST AND NORTH. 29 



WOODED REGION OP NORTHERN MINNESOTA AND OF MANIT015A AND KEEWATIN, 

 PARTLY COVERED BY THIS LAKE. 



East from the flat prairie of the Red River Valley is the undulating 

 and in |)art rolling- and hilly wooded region of northern Minnesota and 

 eastern Manitoba. This is a difficult district for exploration, as the greater 

 part of it has neither settlement nor roads, excepting those of the scanty 

 population of Ojibway Indians, who maintain themselves chiefly by hunting 

 and Ashing and live in nearly the same manner as when Beltrami crossed 

 this country from the Red River Valley to the Upper Mississippi River 

 seventy years ago. Their abodes are usually on the shores of lakes and 

 streams, which they navigate in birch-bai-k canoes; and this is the only 

 practicable means of travel for geologic exploration. Considerable tracts, 

 especially west of the Lake of the Woods and south to Red Lake, are 

 tamarack swamps, morasses, and quaking bogs, called "muskegs," which 

 extend many miles and can be cros.sed only when they are frozen in winter. 

 Northwest of Red Lake a large area, described and named Beltrami Island 

 in Chapter VI, rises to a maximum height of about 100 feet above the 

 highest level of Lake Agassiz. Eastward from Beltrami Island a large tract 

 between Red Lake and the Rainy River, reaching to the Big and Little 

 Forks, lies 50 to 150 feet below the highest stage of Lake Agassiz; but 

 the northeastern part of this area may have been still covered by the 

 waning ice-sheet when the lake stood at that height. On account of the 

 impracticability of tracing the shores of Lake Agassiz through this wooded 

 and uninhabited region, the northeastern limits of this glacial lake, where 

 the shore in its successive stages passed from the land surface to the barrier 

 of the receding ice-sheet, remain undetermined. 



The part of Keewatin north and northeast of Lake Winnipeg presents 

 no considerable elevations, but is mainly a broad, nearly flat expanse, 

 similar to the Red River Valley and the lake district of Manitoba, slowly 

 declining to the sea-level. Dr. Robert Bell writes of it as follows: 



The region through which the upper two-thirds of the Nelson River flows may be 

 de.scribed as a tolerably even Laurentian plain, sloping toward the sea at the rate of 

 about 2 feet in the mile. The river, for the first hundred miles ftom Great Playgreen 

 Lake, does not flow in a valley, but spreads itself by many channels over a consider- 



