A FIELD OF ESKERS IN CENTRAL IOWA 
JOHN E. SMITH 
{ABSTRACT) 
This area is located chiefly in Polk County, one to three miles 
west .of Camp Dodge in a swampy section of the south side of 
Beaver Creek valley. It is just north of the recessional moraine 
that extends in an east- west direction across parts of Polk and 
Dallas counties. Within an area about a mile wide and two or 
three miles long lying rriostly in sections 19 and 20 of Jefferson 
township, there are a dozen or more eskers which the writer first 
studied during observations made in this locality in 1910. 
The eskers are irregular in size when considered individually 
and when compared with each other and vary as follows : in width, 
10 yards to 100 yards; in height, 15 feet to 40 feet or more; in 
length, 100 yards to one mile. They contain clay, sand, gravel 
and coarser material and show some stratification. A few of 
them are nearly at right angles to the general direction of the 
moraine in this vicinity, some of them are nearly parallel to the 
direction of the valley (’southeasterly), and some lie in a com- 
ponent of the two directions. Among them a few winding 
curves are found and some of them end in or near a field of kames. 
As no good structure sections of the eskers were available for 
study, no explanation of their origin was given. 
During the discussion of the paper, these eskers were compared 
with those in Worth and Dickinson counties. 
Departme^nt op Geology, 
Iowa State College. 
