124 NARRATIVE, &c. 



might be set in motion, without the labor of clearing and grub- 

 bing, and a farm reclaimed with no additional labor but that of 

 fencing. Wood is often wanting on the immediate margin of 

 the river. It is not always so ; and when thus wanting, forests 

 may be observed on the hilly grounds, at a distance. Wild hay 

 might be cut in any quantity. It is among the facts which mark 

 the natural history of the region, that the buffalo, or more strictly 

 speaking, the bison, which fed on these plains, in 1820, has not 

 appeared here since. The Virginia deer and the elk are, how- 

 ever, still abundant. The absence of lime stone will probably 

 prove the most formidable bar to its settlement. Nothing of 

 this kind is found except in its southern borders. There ap- 

 pears 1o be no formations of rock elevated above the soil, but 

 the limited district called the Petites Roches. And the strata 

 here are exclusively referrable to the primitive series. 



The entrances of a small river called Nokassippi, about two 

 hundred miles above St. Anthony's Falls, may be considered as 

 the termination of this tract. Above this point, although the 

 Mississippi has some rich alluvions, as at the mouth of Sandy 

 Lake River, its vegetation assumes generally an alpine charac- 

 ter, and a large portion of the wide area of its valley, is tra- 

 versed by pine ridges, with innumerable intervening lakes, and 

 extensive tracts of, what the natives denominate, mushkeegs. 



On crossing through the forty-fifth parrallel of latitude, the 

 Mississippi exhibits a change in the materials of its banks prepa- 

 ratory to its entering the limestone region. This is first render- 

 ed strikingly visible on the rapids immediately above the Falls 

 of St. Anthony. The fall itself is an imposing exhibition of geo- 

 logical scenery. The river here sinks its level about forty feet, 

 in the distance of, say 1,500 yards.* Sixteen feet of this has 

 been estimated to consist of a perpendicular fall, reaching, with 



* The total descent of the river at these falls, including the rapids above and 

 below them, is staed in my " Narrative Journal of Travels to the Sources of the 

 Mississippi," at 65 feet, an estimate which it is believed may exceed the actual 

 aggregate descent, and certainly does so, in the hasty estimate which is given of 

 the perpendicular fall. 



