USA > Indiana > St Joseph County > A history of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Volume 1 > Part 5
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Throughout the drift area the physical fea- tures vary but little. Above the striated floor- rocks, the worn and peculiarly flattened bowl- ders and pebbles, the heaps and ridges of sand and gravel, and the vast mass of bluish elay. or till, accompany the glacial matter and make almost the whole of its bulk. In Amer- ica the drift lies over a vast irregular area. as yet very indefinitely outlined in the north, but pretty accurately defined along the south- ern boundary. From the highlands of Can- ada an enormous glacier, or rather series of glaciers, descended into the region south of the Great Lakes, overwhelming with moraine matter a large part of the United States. from the Atlantic to the Pacific. An exam- ination of this drift or moraine matter shows it to consist, in a large degree, of silicious debris, brought from a region of granite. gneiss, greenstone, quartzite and various other metamorphic or igneous rocks quite foreign to the area covered by the mass. Nor is it difficult to see, in a general way, that much of this matter has been transported from the Canadian highlands, where the granitic and other crystalline roeks are found in place,
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HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.
their surfaces torn, worn and shattered by the glacial action.
The mass of matter, very appropriately named Glacial Drift, which is probably the most important, and certainly the least under- stood geological feature of Indiana, is in the form of an irregular wedge, its thick end to the north, its edge, or thin end, to the south. Of course this description is of the most general nature, but we must bear in mind the peculiar shape and position of the mass in order to have a ready understanding of its particular features. Taking this vast wedge of matter, then, and beginning our examination in the neighborhood of its south- ern limit, or edge, we find it more or less obscurely outlined and its constituent parts passing by insensible gradations into the clays formed of decomposed rocks. Proceeding northward, mere superficial observation dis- covers that the drift mass grows thicker and an occasional bowlder is seen, while here and there a bed of smooth gravel appears along with deposits of sand. Upon examination the bowlders prove to be rounded, scoured and scratched blocks of granite, gneiss, green- stone and other igneous or metamorphic rocks, and the pebbles of the gravel are simply minute bowlders of the same materials. The sand, when carefully studied, appears to be composed mostly of particles of quartz. feld- spar, mica and other silicious crystals, evi- dently the result of a grinding up of igneous rocks.
Bluish or smoky gray colored clay is next discovered and at once becomes the chief com- ponent of the drift mass. growing thicker, step by step, as we go northward, save where water and other agents have thinned or re- moved it. Another very notable fact is the increase in the number of bowlders apace with our progress toward the northern end of the wedge. This gray-blue clay, or bowl- der till, is a mass of pulverized rock some- times quite appreciably calcareous, but often almost wholly silicious, as if it were a grist of granite rocks ground between some monstrous
upper and nether millstone and poured out upon the surface of our state. From middle Indiana northward ridges and hills of gravel and sand, and vast accumulations of bowlders, appear at irregular intervals. Sand, heaped in hillocks and eccentric waves, covers a large area in the northern quarter of the state. Under all this, however, lies the bowlder till, or blue-gray clay, which grows thieker grad- ually, in a general way, as we approach the northern limit.
Nearly all the principal valleys of Indiana lie so that their water-flow is from northeast to southwest, and are trenches cut by some agency, not only through the drift mass, but often through parts of the underlying paleo- zoic rocks as well. Leading into these valleys from all directions smaller streams cut the land surface into irregular areas, and expose very interesting sections of the drift mass. Along most of the water courses, large and small, the glacial materials have been assorted at certain points and re-arranged in terraces of stratified sand, gravel and water-worn frag- ments of stone. In the northern part of the state, especially between Lake Michigan and the southern limits of the Kankakee and Yel- low River valleys. the bowlder clay has a large number of deep basins filled with water, form- ing beautiful little lakes.
Wherever streams of water have worn deep channels into the drift. and wherever wells have been sunk into or through the same, there have been disclosed marked peculiari- ties of deposition. In cutting through the bowlder clay, which is usually a most solid and refractory substance, strata or intercal- ated beds of gravel and sand are found, not in persistent sheets but usually lenticular, that is, double convex lens form, or in some other eccentric form of deposition, curiously gripped in the surrounding clay. Some of these sand and gravel masses would seem of great extent, however, serving as vast sponges to hold the water caught between the beds of impervious clay. All through the drift mass bowlders of every size, from tons in weight
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HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.
to pebbles of the size of a pea, are found, hav- ing worn faees whose striae are usually par- allel to their longer axes. In many places the deposits are euriously curved and other- wise contorted, a condition which shows very plainly wherever the clay, gravel and sand are stratified to some extent. Bowlder elay is quite variable in the relative proportion of its constituents. While many sections show homogeneous gray or bluish clay, with only here and there pebbles and bowlders, other sections disclose almost every degree of mix- ture between pure clay. obscurely stratified gravel beds and so-called bowlder dykes. The farther we go north in Indiana, speaking with reference to a general average, the greater becomes the admixture of bowlders. pebbles and angular fragments of roek in the clay, especially toward its surface. and the more extended become the interealated strata of sand and gravel: while, at the same time. the number of basins containing water in- creases, both at the surface and within the mass. The drift appears in places to be parted by a stratum, or strata, of aneient soil, in which are found vegetable remains more or less preserved, consisting of tree-trunks, branches and roots, belonging to what have been large forest trees.
One striking feature of the superficial de- posits of the drift is the situation of the cleanest gravel on the north side of the hills and ridges. In faet. it is a rule, with com- paratively few exceptions, that a seetion drawn north and south through a drift hill will diselose the coarse gravel and bowlders heaped in a more or less wedge-shaped mass against the north or northeastern side of the elevation, the rest of which will be sand and clay. Furthermore, beginning with the north- most line of the seetion, the eoarsest part of the gravel will come first, and its pebbles will grow finer as you pass southward aeross the eutting until it becomes sand, and you find the clay against which it lies. Of course this is not always the case, and many modifi- cations of the rule will be discovered, owing
to recent or comparatively reeent erosions and other disturbances; but every observer will admit the larger fact to be the rule itself. Even where conical hills or knobs of gravel are found, as is often the case, standing quite isolated on our level table lands, a section of each will generally show a gradation in the gravel, the pebbles diminishing in size along a line from north to south, or from northeast to southwest, the south side passing into sand.
Between practically horizontal sheets of the bowlder clay of Indiana, basins or under- ground lakes of fresh water exist in many places, and when tapped by borings the water will often flow as an artesian fountain above the surface. This well-known feature is the best proof of the impermeable nature of the clay. and is of peculiar interest in connection with a study of the manner in which our drift has been deposited. These underground pockets of water are, as a rule, similar in every way to the small deep lakes that dot the surface of northern Indiana, save that the subterranean basins have been filled with sand and gravel in which the water is held, as in a sponge. Cross sections of the terraces along our rivers show a simple enough re- arrangement of drift materials eaused by the action of the water. as the streams gradually decreased in volume, subsequent to the with- drawal of the glaciers, while the loess, bluff or lacustral deposits indicate the bottoms of comparatively recent fresh water lakes over a large area of our state.
The cuttings of the old Louisville and New Albany railroad. from New Albany on the Ohio river to Michigan City on Lake Miehi- gan, give a key to many of the most inter- esting problems connected with the drift. As we follow this line from the southern to the northern border of the state, we may note how, from a fringe of doubtful glacial debris, the mass of superimposed materials thiekens over the rocks in place, until at length the excavations no longer reach deep enough to sever the bowlder clay. It requires no prae-
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HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.
tieed eye to recognize the flat, monotonous billows of the glacial table-lands as soon as they are reached. The whole country, from within thirty miles of the Ohio river to the valley of the Kankakee, presents the appear- ance of having been heaved into long low waves; but erosion, in fact, and not upheaval, has formed this rolling surface, and each bil- low is found to be simply a barrier of drift between two drainage beds. Another feature of the drift is not easily observable, save by the use of the level or the barometer. It is a series of waves or swells of the surface, made on a grand scale, and running, in a general way, east and west without any ap- parent reference to the valleys of erosion. These waves or swells are due to what may be called forward or backward steps of the glacier or glaciers during the vacillations of climate between the beginning and the end of the ice period.
V. LAKES AND SUBTERRANEOUS WATERS.
As already stated, lenticular beds of sand and gravel, strata of ancient soil and pockets or subterranean basins of water, are found hermetically sealed up in the body of the blue bowlder clay of the drift. These fea- tures have puzzled the minds of geologists not a little, and by some they have been con- sidered inexplicable in connection with the glacial theory. At first glance it would seem quite impossible to account for a stratum of soft black muek and loam found intercalated between thick beds of drift clay, especially when this soil contains roots, branches and even trunks of trees showing little evidence of any erushing or grinding force such as we must look for in connection with the glacial action. This soil and muek, deep buried under a vast mass of the elay, and resting on another mass equally thick, cannot be the result of a mere accident, but must be due to some law. So, with regard to the beds of sand and gravel and the subterranean lakes of the drift; they owe their origin to per- fectly explicable and normal forces acting
consistently with, and, so to speak, parallel with the great glacial movements.
In the study of the surface and subter- raneous waters of the drift, the following facts are readily noted :
1st. Springs of water rising vertically, or practically so, from drift deposits usually come from a great depth, and are more or less impregnated with the salts of iron and other mineral impurities.
2nd. Flowing wells whose waters come from natural reservoirs in the drift clay are usually strongly impregnated with iron which oxidizes upon exposure to the an.
3rd. Wells bored or dug in the drift, and whose water does not rise in the bore, are, as a rule, comparatively free from iron and other mineral impurities, but may occasionally con- tain impurities of a vegetable origin.
In connection with these facts, it has been observed that, in certain localities, gas gen- erated by decomposing vegetable matter has been met with in the drift. This, indeed, would be expected where forests lie moulder- ing in the grip of the clay. But the sudden exit of this gas when reached by a bore shows how impervious, even to the subtilest element, is the bowlder elay. So when water gushes with great force out of a bore we know that the liquid has been safely sealed in the clay reservoir.
The question has been asked, how ean it be that a glacier, or any number of successive glaciers, could have formed in the body of its deposits these pouches of water, these strata of soil and vegetable matter, and these lens- shaped intermediate pockets of sand and gravel? The most usual, and withal, the most plausible answer is the general one which ae- counts for these features of the drift by as- suming that there have been many advances and retreats of the great iee-flood over the area of our glacial deposits, and that the sort- ing action of water, the glacial movements and their attending accidents, have given the grand mass its peculiarity of composition. Such in- tense and prolonged cold as would attend the
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HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.
formation of ice thick enough to fill the con- ditions of the great glacial problem, would freeze the crust of the earth to the solidity of adamant many feet deep. We are not left to mere reasoning or conjecture in this. In many northern regions the earth is now frozen to a great and unknown depth. It could not be otherwise. If thirty or forty days of weather with the temperature vary- ing between the freezing point and ten de- grees below zero will solidify the ground to a depth of two feet, as is often the case now in our state, how deep would continuous boreal winter for many centuries solidify it?
When the glacial period began in Indiana, no tertiary deposits had been laid down upon our carboniferons rocks, for there is no good evidence of the tertiary formations here. The fauna of the carboniferous seas consisted of marine forms, and in a large degree the genera were those having a very deep water habitat. As the sea became shallow, at length the marine life disappeared. At the begin- ning of the ice age, there must have existed in Indiana the broken remnants, so to speak, of the carboniferous sea-a sea at that time full of sandy, desolate islands, upon which, in places, a scant vegetation may have begun to appear. Far northward, the mountains of Canada were already covered with snow, and year by year a boreal temperature was creep- ing southward, on account of a far with- drawal of the deep seas and great changes in their climate-controlling currents. It is not probable that those Canadian mountains were very high; indeed, they must have been low enough to be finally overwhelmed by the awful accumulations of snow and ice north of them, for it is plain that the great glacier flowed over them instead of simply running down their sides. It is impossible to deter- mine how often the ice has flowed over and retreated from the area now covered by the drift, but there is the best evidence that the alterations have been many, and between a great extreme of cold on the one hand and a sub-arctic temperature on the other. In other
words, while the frigidity during glacial action was incalculably powerful, the inter- vals of recession were, as a rule, far from tropical, as we now understand the word.
Let us try to get a view of the surface con- dition of our drift area after the withdrawal of the first great glacial agent. The high- lands of Canada have been largely demol- ished, the basins of the lakes have been scooped out of the paleozoic rocks and are filled with solid masses of iee covered over with glacial debris, and the surface of north- ern Indiana is covered with an immense drift deposit. We have said that the great lake basins were left full of solid ice, when the glacier had retreated far northward, and that the surface of this ice was covered with a coat- ing of drift material. The same statement is applicable to innumerable small basins left in the glacial clay, just such basins, in fact. as the retreat of the last glacier left filled with ice and covered with sand, gravel and bowl- ders, and which latter basins are now the beau- tiful little lakes of northern Indiana. But how, if these basins were solidly filled with ice, did they come to be covered with a layer of sand, gravel and bowlders ? The question is easily answered. As the foot of the great glacier receded northward a constant flow of water was caused by its melting, the washing force of which carried forward fine sand and gravel, and also icebergs loaded with morainie matter, all of which was distributed over the surface upon which the water flowed. It is apparent, from the very nature of things, that a vast deep basin, in the frozen erust of the earth, filled with a solid lump of ice, would be very slow to melt, and that the glacier overlying it would retreat on the line of the basin's rim and leave a great tower of ice, in the form of a cone, marking the site. This cone would melt down to the basin's level and then the currents from the still retreating glacier would flow across it, depositing its sand, gravel, bowlders and rock fragments. Then we have the following conditions: The crust of the earth is frozen to a profound
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HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.
depth below the ice which fills the lake basins, while upon the ice is deposited a thick mass of drift material, transported there by water and icebergs. One instantly sees how great a time it would require to melt a vast cake of iee under such conditions. Indeed, before this melting was accomplished the glacier re- turned and flowed over the whole area again. But the very circumstances which caused a return of the glacier necessarily operated to re-congeal such parts of the drift as had been thawed, so that the surface over which the second glacier flowed was rendered as hard as were the paleozoic rocks upon whose sur- face it first eut its lasting autograph. This mass of sand, gravel and bowlder-clay, frozen to adamantine solidity, must have been a very refractory substance for a glacier to grind down. Indeed, the second glacier had a more stubborn material to overcome than had the first. So we can readily see how each retreat of the glacier left deep basins full of ice in the surface of the drift, and how each return of the glacier buried these basins of ice deep under another mass of clay. HIenee. all through the grand body of our glacial de- posits, we find the hermetically sealed pockets of water which represent the imprisoned ice- cakes now melted in the buried basins. The lenticular beds of sand and strata of soil and muck are to be accounted for upon the same grounds. When the time between the retreat and the return of the glacier was long enough. vegetation was generated upon favored areas of the drift, and a soil was formed which, if on low places, was covered up when again the glacier appeared.
In order to illustrate the theory above set forth, let us take Lake Maxinkuckee as an example and suppose that there should come a return of the great glacier from the direc- tion of the northeast. We must remember that before this could happen a long period of intense cold would have to prepare the way by freezing solid all the lakes and rivers and the earth's erust to a great depth. Maxin- kuekee would be congealed from surface to
bottom, and the great glacier, creeping down from its source, and scraping and ploughing the granite-like. frozen surface of the ground, would bury the beautiful little lake deep under a mighty mass of moraine elay, sand, gravel and bowlders, where it would remain unmelted until the temperature of the sur- rounding earth rose above freezing point, when it would slowly turn to water and be- eome, not an underground lake, but, by the processes of pressure and solution, a subter- raneous mass of so-called water-bearing clay or water sands.
Evidently there were long spaces of time in the glacial age during which the ice neither advanced nor retreated, but was held in ar- rest. No doubt when an advance followed such a pause the glacier overrode its hard frozen terminal moraine, and in this way left large masses of trees and other matter buried in an uncrushed state, for at every step we must constantly bear in mind the aretie inten- sity of the cold during these periods of aeeu- mulation. The immense volume of sand which is thrown out of our lakes, even the smaller ones. is proof of the fact that, during the time they were frozen solid, their surface was covered with a coat of drift which sank when the ice melted.
But the question arises: Why are the waters of flowing wells and deep springs, that have their reservoirs in the drift, nearly al- ways impregnated with salts of iron or other mineral impurities, while the waters of wells that do not flow are usually comparatively pure ? The answer must be that flowing wells and springs presuppose, in a general way, that their reservoirs are fed from the surface by filtration through permeable parts of the drift, and that the water takes up the iron and other minerals from the material through which it passes, while the water in wells that are unflowing is not furnished from the sur- face, or any higher strata of sand and gravel, but really is water from imprisoned iee melted in the body of the drift elay. Of course not all flowing wells are iron water, nor impreg-
9
HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.
nated to a great degree with other minerals ; but that is the rule. The fact suggests itself, in this connection, that all the porous beds of sand and gravel, intercalated between masses of the drift elay. were probably full of water, in a frozen state, when they were buried. It must not be understood, however, that this explanation is sufficient to compass all the conditions under which water is found in the drift, but it does seem quite applicable to many special problems in that connection which heretofore have not been solved satis- factorily.
VI. MORAINES AND WATERWAYS.
The foregoing account, showing the prob- able origin of our lakes and underground waters, as also of the solid ingredients of the drift upon which we are located, is applicable not only to St. Joseph county but also to the greater part of northern Indiana. To Dr. Montgomery's very able paper, already re- ferred to, we are indebted for the following review of the action of the last glacier, re- sulting in the existing moraines, hills, rivers and valleys going to make up the present sur- face of St. Joseph county.
During the earlier part of the quater- nary geologieal period, as Dr. Montgom- ery tells us, the crust of the earth was subject to varied and wide-spread oscillations, elevations and depressions. Elevations were most marked in higher latitudes, and on our own continent through the north central part, comprising Labrador, the Canadas and the great lake region. These oscillations were attended with great changes in elimate, the elevated regions being subject to extreme cold. The territories immediately north of us were elevated from two to three thousand feet, and from continued snowfall during a long period of time became covered with ice to a depth of from five to ten thousand feet. This frozen mass was known as the great Continental ice- sheet, and extended south near Cincinnati to a point a few miles below the Ohio river. From this point the lower border of the ice-sheet
took a northeasterly and northwesterly course. The cause of the great glacial epoch is not fully understood. But we know that even in our own day, the surface of the earth, in places, is subject to slow but constant changes in elevation and depression ; and it is elear that the elevation referred to was in itself a strong factor in the production of a severer climate. This climatic condition was favor- able to continued snows which lasted through long ages. The short summer suns had little effect in dissipating the snows, but was suf- ficient to reduce the vast snow-field to glacial ice. As the mass began to pile up to thou- sands of feet in thickness, the known glacial movements began and the great ice flow started southward. The ice mass being of great weight, and frozen solidly to the sur- face upon which it rested in its slow motion onward, carried or dragged everything mov- able with it, and seoured, grooved and polished every surface over which it passed, leveling and pushing forward all loose material found in its pathway. The great ereases or channels in the surface rock produced by stream ero- sion were partly obliterated by glacial erosion and partly filled up by glacial rubbish. As the ice-sheet approached and passed into the great lakes its lower margin became lobated and each lobe took a course largely in the di- rection of the lake valleys. but as these lobes emerged they began to coalesce, forming again an almost unbroken front, pushing on- ward to the south loaded with bowlders, gravel, sand and elay. As the ice-sheet moved on it approached a warmer climate until the loss by melting at the south equalled the pro- duetion from the north and caused the ice border to remain stationary for unknown years. From this line the ice yielded up its waters which rolled onward to the sea through the great central waterway, the Mississippi.
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