The potential for archeological sites associated with the falls, therefore, exists along the entire route of its migration. Where they viewed the falls from or where they might have portaged around it probably changed from decade to decade, and, at times, from year to year, as the falls retreated. Some fluted points (Clovis and Folsom) and unfluted lanceolate spear points (Plano) found along the river demonstrate that Native Americans visited the corridor as early as the Paleo-Indian era (see Chapter 2). Few artifacts telling of their presence have been found. We know little about the Native Americans’ relationship to the falls over the last 12,000 years ( Figure 2). Owahmenah (“falling water”), one of at least several Dakota names given to the falls that Father Louis Hennepin would rename St. By 1680, when Father Hennepin became the first European to see the falls, it lay roughly 1,500 feet downstream from its present location.įIGURE 2. Soon, the unsupported limestone broke off, and the falls receded upstream, and the process began again. As the water boiled back at the soft sandstone, it undermined the limestone riverbed. ![]() The meltwaters from the colossal glacial Lake Agassiz, lying in northwestern Minnesota and in southern Canada, thundered over it. It measured some 2,700 feet across and stood 175 feet high. You would be drenched by the spray and deafened by the roar of an immense waterfall. Imagine standing on the bluffs over- looking the Mississippi valley near downtown St. The same geology admired by the millers allowed the falls to retreat upriver. What they considered a blessing, however, they almost destroyed. Millers drove shafts through the limestone and shale and then easily excavated their tailraces to the toe of the falls. Beneath these lies a deep deposit of soft St. The limestone covers a veneer of shale and mixed sandstone. As detailed in Chapter 1, the riverbed above the falls is made of a thick mantle of hard Platteville limestone. Anthony Falls thought themselves blessed by the Mississippi River’s geology. Anthony Falls area boasts two National Historic Landmarks – the Pillsbury A Mill and the Washburn A Mill – and, the Great Northern Railway Bridge, a National Engineering Landmark. Technologically, the falls produced the first commercial hydroelectric central plant in the country. Minneapolis would be the nation’s flour capital for 50 years. It gave birth to the saw milling and flour milling industries that became the leading producers of their commodities in the United States and the world. ![]() Economically, it created a city with no peer west of Chicago to the Rock Mountains and south to St. Historically, its visitors and commentators comprise a who’s who of European and American exploration: Father Louis Hennepin, Jonathan Carver, and Zebulon Pike, to name a few. Anthony Falls is the only major falls on the upper Mississippi River. No place in the corridor can match its regional, national, even international significance. No place anchors the MNRRA corridor’s significance like St. Anthony Falls.Īrtist: Peter Gui Clausen, 1869.
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