BORDERING ON THE WISCONSIN RIVER. 



289 



eisely like those seen on Chippewa River, some of which are more than half a mile 

 in length. Very few pebbles are mixed with the sand. The country is a rolling 

 sand-plain, with a few pine bushes and dwarf oaks scattered over it. 



The next exposure of rock is at the commencement of the Grand Rapids, about 

 twelve miles below the mouth of Plover River. These Rapids are nine miles long. 

 Their " grandeur" consists not in cascades or bold escarpments, but in their length, 

 and the great number of low, picturesque rock-islands, covered with trees, which 

 dot the river, and divide it into numerous narrow channels or chutes. The rock is 

 a very compact felspathic gneiss, with occasional wide veins of granite traversing it ; 

 gradually assuming a true porphyritic character about the middle of the Rapids ; 

 and, toward their termination, merging into a gneissoid granite ; and, finally, at the 

 village of " Grand Rapids," into a fine-grained, reddish-coloured granite, of precisely 

 the same character with that which overlies the gneiss at Conant's Rapids. The 

 bearing of the rocks is east-northeast and west-southwest. 



The village at this place contains a number of good houses, and, from the air of 

 business and comfort about it, I should judge it to be a prosperous one. There are 

 three mills on these Rapids, which give employment, directly and incidentally, to a 

 large number of men. The river banks in the vicinity are low. The country is 

 covered with a good growth of oak, elm, poplar, birch, sugar maple, and pine. 



October 12. There was a light fall of snow last night, and the sprinkling of pure 

 white on almost every variety and shade of colour of autumnal foliage, intermingled 

 with evergreens, combined, with the wooded islands in the distance, the Rapids, 

 with their rocky projections, in the foreground, and the dense forest on either shore, 

 to make up one of the most picturesque and fairy-like scenes imaginable. 



The river, for some distance below this point, is full of rock-islands, rising from 

 ten to fifteen feet above the water-level, and made up of a reddish-coloured rock, 

 composed of quartz and felspar, bearing northeast and southwest, with a dip of 39° 

 to the southeast. 



About eight miles below the camp of last night, we reached Whitney's Rapids ; 

 the rock, during the whole distance, being a felspathic granite, with little or no ap- 

 pearance of mica in its composition ; and, as the Rapids are approached, showing a 

 great disposition to decompose on exposure to atmospheric influences. 



The last exposure of granite on Wisconsin River is a short distance above the 

 old mill-dam, at these Rapids, and extends down the river for the distance of a 

 quarter of a mile, gradually becoming more quartzose in character, and at the point 

 where it disappears, is traversed by many felspathic veins, from one to eight inches 

 wide, having a northwest and southeast direction. 



Above the granite, at the old mill-dam, is a bed of ferruginous argillite, four feet 

 thick, succeeded by five feet of decomposing felspar, above which is a bed, two feet 

 thick, of well-digested kaolin, or porcelain clay, with large amorphous crystals of 

 quartz disseminated through it in veins, and containing a notable quantity of pyrites. 

 Then succeeds a variegated white and yellow sandstone, in thin lamina?, from the 

 sixteenth of an inch to an inch in thickness, rather coarse-grained, somewhat mica- 

 ceous, and weathering easily. Some of the laminae are green, and the whole dips 

 4° to the southeast. 



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