NE-SAW-JE-WON 



the walls of their cave homes in southern France, the North 

 American ice sheet again had melted back some hundreds of 

 miles ; in northwestern Ohio pools of water gathered along its 

 front, and the Great Lakes had their beginning. 



When the Folsum-Yuma men were hunting bison on our 

 western plains, twenty thousand years ago, the glacier melted 

 away from the ledge of limestone at Lewiston, New York, 

 on the Niagara River, and Niagara Falls was born. Ten thou- 

 sand years later, when our present civilization was dawning in 

 the Near East, the ice had melted entirely from the Great 

 Lakes basins; only a small lake in the Erie basin spilled 

 over Niagara Falls, and the three upper lakes poured their 

 waters in a wide torrent through the Ottawa River valley, 

 in Canada, into the Atlantic Ocean which by then had entered 

 and drowned the Gulf of St. Lawrence as far west as the 

 vicinity of Ottawa, Ontario. Some three thousand years 

 ago — perhaps about the time the camel caravans of King 

 Solomon were bringing copper ores to the smelters of the 

 great king at Exion-Geber and his argosies were sailing the 

 Red Sea, when the glamorous Queen of Sheba brought gold 

 and spices to the ruler of Judeah, when the people of Central 

 and South America were building great pyramid temples to 

 the Sun-God — a sluggish river crossing the flat lands now 

 covered by Lake St. Clair was quickened by flooding waters, 

 as the three upper great lakes deserted their eastern outlet 

 through Ontario and poured their waters southward through 

 the St. Clair and Detroit rivers, and the present Great Lakes 

 system was established. 



This is no fantastic tale of idle dreaming; it is a sketch of 

 events in the Story of the Great Lakes — a romance of Nature's 

 slow, gradual change of the face of the continent, an Auto- 

 graph of Time which the lakes themselves in main part have 

 written— the Story of "NE-SAW-JE-WON," as the Ottawas 

 say, meaning The Waters That Run Down From Lake 

 Superior To The Sea. 



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