BORDERING ON THE WISCONSIN RIVER. 289 
cisely like those seen on Chippewa River, some of which are more than half a mile 
in length. Very few pebbles are mixed with the sand. The country is a rolling 
sand-plain, with a few pine bushes and dwarf oaks scattered over it. 
The next exposure of rock is at the commencement of the Grand Rapids, about 
twelve miles below the mouth of Plover River. These Rapids are nine miles long. 
Their “ grandeur” consists not in cascades or bold escarpments, but in their length, 
and the great number of low, picturesque rock-islands, covered with trees, which 
dot the river, and divide it into numerous narrow channels or chutes. The rock is 
a very compact felspathic gneiss, with occasional wide veins of granite traversing it; 
gradually assuming a true porphyritic character about the middle of the Rapids ; 
and, toward their termination, merging into a gneissoid granite ; and, finally, at the 
village of “Grand Rapids,” into a fine-grained, reddish-coloured granite, of precisely 
the same character with that which overlies the gneiss at Conant’s Rapids. The 
bearing of the rocks is east-northeast and west-southwest. 
The village at this place contains a number of good houses, and, from the air of 
business and comfort about it, I should judge it to be a prosperous one. There are 
three mills on these Rapids, which give employment, directly and incidentally, to a 
large number of men. The river banks in the vicinity are low. The country is 
covered with a good growth of oak, elm, poplar, birch, sugar maple, and pine. 
October 12. There was a light fall of snow last night, and the sprinkling of pure 
white on almost every variety and shade of colour of autumnal foliage, intermingled 
with evergreens, combined, with the wooded islands in the distance, the Rapids, 
with their rocky projections, in the foreground, and the dense forest on either shore, 
to make up one of the most picturesque and fairy-like scenes imaginable. 
The river, for some distance below this point, is full of rock-islands, rising from 
ten to fifteen feet above the water-level, and made up of a reddish-coloured rock, 
composed of quartz and felspar, bearing northeast and southwest, with a dip of 39° 
to the southeast. 
About eight miles below the camp of last night, we reached Whitney's Rapids ; 
the rock, during the whole distance, being a felspathic granite, with little or no ap- 
pearance of mica in its composition; and, as the Rapids are approached, showing a 
great disposition to decompose on exposure to atmospheric influences. 
The last exposure of granite on Wisconsin River is a short distance above the 
old mill-dam, at these Rapids, and extends down the river for the distance of a 
quarter of a mile, gradually becoming more quartzose in character, and at the point 
where it disappears, is traversed by many felspathic veins, from one to eight inches 
wide, having a northwest and southeast direction. 
Above the granite, at the old mill-dam, is a bed of ferruginous argillite, four feet 
thick, succeeded by five feet of decomposing felspar, above which is a bed, two feet 
thick, of well-digested kaolin, or porcelain clay, with large amorphous crystals of 
quartz disseminated through it in veins, and containing a notable quantity of pyrites. 
Then succeeds a variegated white and yellow sandstone, in thin lamine, from the 
sixteenth of an inch to an inch in thickness, rather coarse-grained, somewhat mica- 
ceous, and weathering easily. Some of the laminz are green, and the whole dips 
4° to the southeast. 
37 
