KANSAS CITY PREHISTORIC REMAINS. 195 



•channel. When this portion of our continent was at a i!;reater elevation 

 than at present, and our river channels much deeper than now, which is 

 manifest from the great thickness of the drift material that overlies the un- 

 disturbed rocks which form the bottom of the old channels and marks their 

 course, the long glacier period began. Glaciers were formed which ex- 

 tended from the North Pole to about the thirty-eighth degree of north lati- 

 tude, having a thickness of thousands of feet, and overtopping nearly all 

 of our mountains. During this period this irresistible mass, moving down 

 from the north, filled the old channels of our streams and diverted some of 

 them, as the Kansas river, which I have just alluded to. It is at the close 

 of this ]@ng period that the computation of time associating man with this 

 mute witness, this unmistakable work of his hand, properly begins. 



At the close of the glacial period, this portion of our continent, which, 

 during that time, had suffered great depression and was submerged, again 

 emerged from the water and marked the beginning of our present river chan- 

 nels. But the emergence was not so complete but that there were left 

 numerous lakes of various magnitudes, extending over a vast area of coun- 

 try, including the drainage of the Platte, the Missouri, the Mississippi, the 

 Ohio, the Hudson, the Niagara, the St. Lawrence, and other streams east of 

 the Eocky Mountains, as well, perhaps, as those west of these mountains. 

 It was in these residuary lakes that the Loess, or Bluff deposit took place, pre- 

 cipitated from the sediment borne into the lakes by the streams affording 

 their supply. But what is more particularly associated with my subject for 

 this evening is the Loess formation of the Missouri, and especially at Kansas 

 ■City. We have here at least three periods, or more properly, levels of Bluff 

 deposits, one overtopping all, or nearly all, of our rocky bluffs, the other 

 two at lower levels, corresponding with the terraces in the bluffs overlook- 

 ing West Kansas. At the highest level the river, or, rather more properly, 

 the lake into which it flowed, was probably thirty miles or more in width, 

 embracing a large portion of its present drainage. Yast as must have been 

 the volume of water, irresistible as must have been the floods coursing 

 down the Missouri's water-way, produced by a much greater annual rain 

 fall than we have at present, and the melting away of the annual snows 

 reinforced by the melting of the retiring ancient glaciers, we are still not 

 justified in believing that a river so vast in volume, so exj)anded in breadth 

 as thirty miles or more from shore to shore, with a depth of several hund- 

 red feet, a velocity exceeding that of the j^i'esent Missouri at its flood, could 

 have been maintained. Nor is such a stream consistent with the facts pre- 

 sented by the bluff formation along its oanks. Hence, we are led to the 

 very reasonable conclusion, that the large bodies of water, which evidently 

 prevailed, were lakes formed within the drainage of the river, along the 

 general course of its channel, caused by obstructions across its way. The 

 obstructions, no doubt, were caused by the filling up of the old channel of 

 the Missouri, by which, in places, it was entirely diverted and the channel 

 thrown across narrow, rocky barriers, as in the case of the Niagara. The 



