The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1885-03-22
NEW GEOLOGICAL WRINKLES
The Three Subterranean Forests Which
Exist Under the New State-HOuse.
tThe Strange Freaks of Rivers-How Town
Changed Its Location-The Way
Crown Hill Was Formed.


porter of Geologist Collett. you gave me
hint of it once, but do not fully understand il"
"Wel, to start with, it was not thrown up at
all; 1t just got left, as the boys say. A good
many curious persons have asked me about the
formation of Crown Hill, and / think have
repeated the story dozen times to individuals,
but never to a press reporter. remember l
explained it to Judge Roache once, and he was
extremely surprised and pleased at the method
OF its formation, as indeed, every one is who has
not studied the phenomena of the glacial age.
eff you ever read physical geography or any
elementary geology. continued Dr. Collect,
you remember we have two kinds of mountains,
snountains formed by folding, like the successive
ridges of the Alleghenes-long gentle folds of
,stratifed rock thrown up by the pressure
that came from the sinking of the At
lantic ocean bed Such ranges always
lie at right angles to the line of the force pres
sure that formed them Like the ridges of the
Pennsylvania mountains, each have long, gentle
slopes on the ocean side and abrupt descents on
zhe opposite side. Sometimes they are pushed
clear over on themselves, so that the strata are
doubled or folded. Then, again. whole coun-
try is washed away, except certain hard portions
which remain as hills; the socalled mountains OF
Brown county, forty miles south of here, are den
udation mountains. In the Bad Lands of Dako-
ia the coal seams which underlie the country
took fire of themselves and burned out over an
area as big as Indiana, and where there was clay
right over the coal seams it was baked into ter
ia cotta-a natural sheet of firm red brick, which
protects the layers under it from denudation, and
so the country is worn into a series of the most
fantastic and weird forms to be met outside of
volcanic or mountainous region These fires are
burning yet in several places In Dakota. The
denudaton mountains of plains are never very
high. The fact is that the whole surface OF the
continent is being washed into the sea at the rate
OF about one foot in 5000 years This Is done
hxycf
If the stream runs for hundreds of miles through
desert as the Colorado river does, it will make
for itself a gorge perhaps mile deep, and
as long az the rainless region, and right
through the hardest quartZite and granite. But
usually the whole surface of the country
goes off with the water and is washed
into the sea- and the rivers are found
near the surface in all countries having
3 large annual precipitation of storm
waters-m eteoric waters. the signal service folks
and meteoroogists call them. This mud makes
deItas like that of the Mississippi, Nile and
Ganges Part Of Louisiana is made up that way.
If there is strong tide, where rivers like the
St Lawrence and Amazon empty right into the
open ocean by estuary mouths. we have no
aeltas or sand bars formed; the mud, silt, and
sand and clay is swept along and deposited
long the margins of the continents.
The margins of the lands-about 1876,
900 miles long in all, and this strip about
fifty miles wide, is now, and has always been the
great theater of ocean sedmentaton. After
''0f corrse you know-every school child
knows it now a-days-that all rock was once soil
and all soil was once rock, and the Lord only
knows how often the continents have been
worked down into ocean, and these again have
appeared as solid lands; or as Tennyson puts it in
She In Memoriam:'"
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
q. earth. what changes hast thou seen
There where the long street roars hath been
The stiffness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows and they flow
From form 10 FORM and nothing stands;
They melt like rnists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they stop themselves and CO.
THE FORMATION OF GROWN HILL.
t'But that is neither here nor there, young
man; and presume you fail to see what all this
has to do with that little Crown Hill clay. and
gravel heap; for / will just wager my collection
# books of the early history of Indiana-the
bNst in the State--that the inside of Crown Hill
Is made up of glacier clay, and will show you
why, as we go.aong.
lyon see can't tell you all at once and just
In nutshell how that hill came to be there. If
1 did you wouldn't understand it-you'd just
look wise and pretend you did Might iustas vel!
ary to play the Ten Commandments on a fiddle,
)r describe the Fifth Symphony in words, as TO
make you see in minute just how that hill
came there"
The reporter was here enabled to straighten
dis cramped fingers stretch out hislegs, and recall
Pope's line-at least he thought it was Pope's:
ION earth there's nothing great but man; in
man there's nothing great but mind"
''There's no use,n continued the States elon-
gated encyclopedia of the glacial age, lin just
collecting facts without any knowledge of
principles. What / want to do is to
view, so that the next time you stand on Crown
Hill you viii see written out before you in the
landscape, the whole history of the glacial age,
aud its various succeeding periods, Just the same
aol.x,,a had 1lU my n1,tir
Of geological reports.
but let rs get down to business. More than
half of this State is covered with glacial drift
varying from ten to300feet in thickness. Around
Indianapolis it is from eighty to ninety feet
thick; it thins out to nothing forty or fifty miles
south of here You see we live just on the edge
Of the great North American drift area, and no
State affords better field for the study of gla-
bal action and the effects of drift, than Indiana
If the vexed problems of the drift-felds are ever
to be solved--and they are much more difficult
Of solution than those of the stratifed and older
rocks on which they rest-they can be solved
right here in Indiana. This Crown Hill is only
one of many, due to the same general cause.
Similar mounds are found in Shelby and De
> eatur counties, near st. Paul, and many of
them have been opened for gravel roads and
turnpike: they furnish good, clean road gravel
These mounds are best studied because best rep
resented in Indiana and the most perfect of
them ALL and most clearly related to their com
mon cause is the gravel mound of Grown Hill
"A beautiful and natural mound, round and
symmetrical as the old fashioned sugar loaf, is
found in Bean Blossom creek valley. east Of
Gosport. and a very similar one in the valley of
Little Raecocn creek, near Hillsdale, in Yer
million county. You see they all occur in river
valleys-mnd that, win you Similar hills ex-
ist in the northern part of Montgomery and
southern part of Benton counties, which, prob
ably. date back to q period before the great Wa
bash river had any certain route or separate ex-
istence.
''Weed- patch Hill, the highest point in the
State, and the other hills of Brown county, may
be seen or clear day from Crown Hill, but they
are hills from dengdaficn They stood above
and resisted and stopped the glacier, and kept it
out Of Brown county.
= Around their sides the ice water deposited
terraces, as if to record the highest food upon
these meters of the great glacial river, while