SOUTH SHORE OF LAKE SUPERIOR. 433 
trap and conglomerate into the plain of red clay that occupies the space between 
the mountains and the Lake. As the lower part of all the branches of Bad River 
and the main trunk itself are washed out of the red clay deposit, the water has a 
thick chocolate-red colour when there are rains in any part of the region. The 
first falls, in ascending the East Fork, are over the conglomerate and sandstone 
rocks, where the river rushes through a gorge, with a descent of one hundred and 
five feet in about four hundred and fifty feet along the channel. 
Forty rods above is a second series of chutes, plunging sixty-five feet in one-fourth 
of a mile over trap and conglomerate, the highest single cataract being twenty-eight 
feet. 
A few miles above the upper chutes, the stream assumes a north-and-south direc- 
tion through the mountains, and, spreading into numerous arms, gathers its supplies 
in the lakes, ponds, and marshes, adjacent to the heads of the Montreal. 
Between the “ Maringouin Fork” and the “East Fork,” there are two principal 
tributaries of Bad River, in size a little less than the other three, but capable of 
furnishing, by their volume and their rapid descent, an unlimited amount of water- 
power. 
The most easterly of the two middle forks I have called “Tyler's Fork,” which is 
divided above its falls into two equal branches; the other, which preserves the 
general direction of the main trunk, may, with propriety, retain its name, as the 
Mashkeg or Bad River. 
There is no canoe navigation on Tyler’s Fork, or the Upper Bad River, so swift is 
the current and narrow and crooked are the channels. 
Tyler’s Fork comes out of the mountains about twelve miles southeast by south 
from Woods’s, in a chasm, two hundred feet deep, in the red sand-rock and conglo- 
merate. The junction of its ten branches takes place in this narrow gulf or 
“canon,” the eastern branch making a plunge of forty-two feet, succeeded, as you 
ascend, by a series of chutes over trap-rocks forty feet in one-fourth of a mile. Mr. 
D. Tyler, of the Charter Oak Company, made a location here, and built a rude cabin 
at the edge of the falls. 
The westerly branch comes down this “caiion,” occupying its whole breadth, 
between mural precipices of conglomerate and trap. The observer, standing at the 
crest of the lower fall, hears the roar of another, apparently not far distant, and, 
clambering over the rocks in that direction, comes suddenly upon a cataract, peculiar 
for its romantic figure, even when compared with those numerous waterfalls that 
astonish the traveller upon the waters flowing into Lake Superior. 
The perpendicular fall is thirty feet, divided into different channels by the inequa- 
lity of the trap-rock, which is alternately hard and soft, and across the whole, raised 
up and lodged by high floods many feet above the water, are large, naked pine trees, 
resting, like the stringers of a bridge, upon points of rock projecting from the shore. 
The descent from the foot of this fall to the other is thirty-seven feet in about sixty 
rods. 
We discovered no remarkable falls upon the Upper Bad River, although they 
probably exist. Where it passes the Penokie Mountain, there is a continuous rush 
of its waters for a mile and a half, giving out the sound of a waterfall in the 
55 
