142 
FOURTEENTH REPORT. 
MAP OF THE OLD DISTRIBUTARIES OF THE ST. CLAIR AND 
DETROIT RIVERS. 
BY F. B. TAYLOR. 
Abstract. 
The crest of the Port Huron moraine crosses the St. Clair River one 
and one-half miles north of the village of St. Clair. The moraine is 
water laid in this part and is a smooth, broad ridge, without the rough 
or hummocky expression of landlaid moraines. It rises to about 60 feet 
above the surface of the river and was an obstructive barrier in the 
first flow of the river. In its first flow over it the river made a number 
of shallow channels running southwest down the face of the moraine. 
Some of these are more than one-quarter of a mile wide, and others very 
narrow, mere creases in the surface. The master one of these streams 
cut deepest and soon robbed the rest of their water. This master 
stream flowed where the river now passes through the moraine. These 
first distributaries headed a little above the level of the Elkton beach. 
At the next, or Lake Algonquin stage, the river south from St. Clair 
was made up of two broad channels separated by a narrow gravel ridge. 
The ridge is an esker with its top toward its south end (west of Roberts 
Landing) fashioned into a beach. The river finally chose the channel 
on the east side and left the western one abandoned. The latter is now 
a swamp a mile wide extending from St. Clair nearly to Algonac. 
In dropping to the Lake Algonquin stage the river cut through the 
morainic ridge at Detroit and through heavy bowlderv drift masses 
between Trenton and Amherstburg. The cut at Detroit is simple, with 
no marked distributaries. It formed the gravelly, sandy delta at Del- 
ray with its head at the gravelly ridge at Fort Wayne in the west part 
of Detroit. 
The distributaries around Trenton and Amherstburg and on Grosse 
Lsle are particularly fine. The earliest, highest ones head northwest of 
Trenton and northeast of Amherstburg. They run southward to the 
lake independently of Detroit River. Most of them are now dry on 
the Trenton side, but some of those on Grosse Isle and on the Amherst- 
burg side are now dead water canals, navigable for small boats. One 
of the most strongly marked and most recently abandoned channels 
starts at the south edge of Trenton and separates Slocum Island from 
the mainland. The Bay south of Grosse Isle was excavated mainly by 
distributaries of Detroit River in their later stages and partly when 
Lake Erie stood slightly lower than now. 
