AGE OF THE MISSOURI RIVER. 27 
into the family of American rivers. Though young in comparison with the other 
great rivers I have named, some idea of its really very great age may be formed 
when it is considered that the great and wide-spread mutations which gave it 
birth and built up our western river systems, occurred between the close of the 
Carboniferous age and the end of Tertiary time The upper carboniferous rocks 
are to be found about Kansas City, and northward along the western border of 
Missouri and eastern borders of Kansas and Nebraska, and the Tertiary forma- 
tions about the elevations of the Rocky Mountains and over their eastern slopes. 
Next in sequence followed the events alluded to as having occurred since 
the Missouri river was increased to the full measure of its present drainage, 
namely, the Glacial and Champlain epochs which occurred in Post-Tertiary time. 
First, the Glacial period was ushered in : 
''Once the fierce Kabibonokka, 
Issued from his lodge of snow- drifts, 
From his home among the icebergs, 
And his hair, with snow besprinkled. 
Streamed behind him like a river,. 
Like a black and wintry river, 
As he howled and hurried southward, 
Over frozen lakes and moorlands." 
The entire country now tributary to the Missouri River was elevated far 
above its present level, and vast glaciers, thousands of feet in thickness, crept 
down from the northward to about the parallel of Kansas City. But before the 
country became mantled in snow and creeping rivers of ice, the Missouri River 
had carved out a channel to an unknown depth, but, perhaps, five hundred feet 
or more below its present bed. The old channel is found to be choked up with 
drift-sand and boulders, borne in by glacial action, and by this means the river 
was partly, and perhaps entirely, diverted in some places. These facts are made 
apparent by the achievements of modern civil engineering in overcoming obsta- 
cles to continuous railway transit. Nine railway bridges now span the Missouri 
River from Omaha downward to its mouth. All of the bridges approach one or 
the other of the river bluffs, generally those on the south side. In sinking piers 
to support the superstructure, solid rock has been found only on one side, i e. the 
side touching the bluffs, although excavations for this purpose were made at all 
of the bridges, in the river's bed, from sixty to more than one hundred feet deep. 
Consequently some of the piers, in each instance those most remote from the 
bluffs, rest on piles driven into the loose erratic material which fills the old chan- 
nel up to the river's present bed. These facts would seem to indicate that the old 
gorge of the river extended from bluff to bluff, and sloped, with more or less reg- 
ularity, downward from the bluff on either side, toward the centre of the valley. 
It required a great lapse of time for the river to cut out such a channel, and long 
ages must have transpired between the close of the Tertiary era and the full in- 
auguration of the Glacial epoch, between which events this work of attrition 
was done. 
