Geological Survey Bulletin 611 Guidebook of the Western United States: Part A

The town of St. Cloud (see sheet 2, p. 26) lies on the opposite side of the river from the railway, so that the traveler can see only the station and a few houses. A rapid in the river near this place is utilized to produce power for a large milling industry. Here the main line of the Great Northern Railway crosses the river, but a branch of that road leading from St. Cloud to Duluth is crossed by the Northern Pacific train a short distance beyond the station.

SHEET No. 2. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

At Sauk Rapids the low granite and drift hills that border the valley on the right (east) approach so close to the river that there is room only for a few streets and the railway between the hills and the river. Masses of granite can be seen in the river channel and the resistance of this rock has produced the rapids at this place. Rock of the same kind is quarried in the bluffs some distance back from the river and is brought to the main line over a short spur for shipment. Above the rapids the river flows quietly between low wooded banks, or rather in a slight depression in the bottom of the broad valley.

Although the hills are less precipitous beyond Sauk Rapids, the presence of granite in the vicinity of Watab station is attested by great bowlders of this material that were evidently picked up by the glacier and distributed along the valley, and also by old quarries that are faintly discernible on the left (west).

The traveler is now approaching the place where Pike's party wintered in 1805-6 on their memorable trip to the source of the Mississippi.¹

---

¹As soon as Louisiana had been acquired from France by the treaty signed at Paris on April 30, 1803, President Jefferson took steps to have the newly acquired country thoroughly explored. He personally planned the expedition to the Pacific coast which was conducted by Lewis and Clark (see p. 47) in 1804-1806 and other expeditions by Lieut. Zebulon M. Pike to the headwaters of the Mississippi and to the great Southwest. Pike's search for the source of the Mississippi took him over ground with which the traveler is now somewhat familiar, and an account of the trip may be of interest.

The country through which Pike traveled was at that time fairly well known, but the earlier explorations had been made by French and English adventurers who were using every means to further the interests of their respective Governments. It had now become the property of the United States, and Jefferson wanted first-hand information not only regarding the geography of the country but also regarding the attitude taken toward the new owner by the Indian tribes and the trappers and traders who gathered furs from this vast wilderness.

Pike left St. Louis on August 9, 1805, with 1 sergeant, 2 corporals, and 17 privates. He found settlements and villages as far up the river as Prairie du Chien, but above that place there was no white settlement and only scattered trading posts of the various fur companies. He reached the mouth of St. Peter (Minnesota) River on September 21, and spent some time visiting the Indians and acquiring for the Government the title to 100,000 acres of land, including the site of Fort Snelling and the Falls of St. Anthony.

He then portaged around the falls and proceeded up the river, but at many places he had considerable difficulty in getting his boats over the rapids. He finally reached the vicinity of Little Falls, but here the river was so rough that he decided it was useless to take the boats farther, so on October 16, 1805, he went into winter quarters on the west bank of the river about 4 miles below the present town of Little Falls.

Pike with a few companions pushed on afoot and endeavored to find the source of the great river. He succeeded in a general way in settling the question, though he did not discover Lake Itasca. Pike returned to Little Falls on March 6, 1806, and on April 10 the entire party embarked once more, reaching St. Louis on the 30th.

---

Between Watab and Rice the railway runs in a flat valley that extends as far as the eye can reach. It is well cultivated, and the fields of grain and potatoes are broken only by some small lakes that are to be seen on the right of the track but these have low shores and are not particularly attractive. As the train glides though mile after mile of waving grain or pasture fields, with here and there a farmhouse nestling beneath the shadow of some ancient oak, it is hard to realize that a little more than a century ago this was a wilderness in which roving bands of Indians found only a scanty subsistence and trappers and traders made journeys with the greatest hardship and discomfort.

Although there are no exposures of rock between Rice and Royalton, the route map opposite page 26 shows many isolated outcrops of granite and slate; and it will be noticed that all the areas of granite lie east of a line passing nearly though Royalton and that all the hard rocks which appear at the surface west of that line are slates or schists (for definition see footnote on p. 155) with the exception of one exposure of Cretaceous shale on the west side of the river nearly opposite Royalton.

A short distance beyond milepost 95 a branch of the Soo Line (Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railway), extending from Brooten to Duluth, crosses the valley and the Northern Pacific track by a long, high fill. North of Royalton, on the right, some rather prominent morainic hills give a pleasing variety to the landscape; and at Gregory the traveler is about opposite the point where Pike's party spent the winter of 1805-6.

Taken all in all, the Mississippi Valley, in which the train runs from Minneapolis to Little Falls, is one of the richest and most attractive valleys in the State.

From Little Falls lead two branch lines of the Northern Pacific, one running up the east bank of Mississippi River to Brainerd and thence to International Falls, on the northern boundary of Minnesota, and the other turning to the left and running to Morris, near the western edge of the State. The falls in the river are produced by hard slate and schist and by diorite (molten material that was forced up and into the sedimentary rocks and that has since been consolidated, forming a hard, dense, dark rock) of Archean age. (See table on p. 2.) These rocks are not massive like the granite at St. Cloud and so they do not make good building material, but they are as hard or harder and form a persistent obstacle to the easy flow of the river. The falls are of great commercial importance, as they furnish 10,000 horsepower, which is utilized by sawmills having a capacity of 70,000,000 board feet of lumber annually, flour and paper mills, and an electric-light plant.

Here once lay the margin of a great evergreen forest that stretched wild and unbroken to Duluth and the falls of Sault Ste. Marie, but now only a few pine trees can be seen here and there along the railway, for most of them have disappeared in the insatiable maws of the great lumber mills. Little Falls is noted among archeologists as a place where a large number of flint implements, belonging to an early race of men, have been found.

At Little Falls the traveler crosses Mississippi River for the last time in his westward trip; he will soon pass out of the Mississippi drainage basin and enter another whose waters find an outlet to the north. After leaving the river the train passes though a country that is typically glacial in all its features. The hard rocks are covered by drift varying in thickness from 35 to 400 feet. Owing to this thick cover the present surface of the ground gives no indication of what is beneath, and for many years it was supposed that this swampy country, covered only with brush and scrub oak, was of no value whatever. After some of the great deposits of iron ore in Minnesota and Wisconsin had been exploited it was found that the best way to prospect for iron ore in this region was with the magnetic needle. Many parts of Minnesota were tested unsuccessfully, but in 1895 it was found that the magnetic needle was affected in this area, and drilling has shown that it is underlain by a large body of iron ore. This deposit is now known as the Cuyuna (ki-you'na) iron range and is one of the three important iron ranges of the State. This range (see map of Cuyuna range on sheet 2, p. 26), as now prospected and developed, extends from Aitkin, about 27 miles northeast of Brainerd, southwestward to the vicinity of Randall. It is about 55 miles long, but its width has not been fully determined. No mining is done near this line of the Northern Pacific Railway, but several mines are operated some 40 miles to the northeast.¹ Little farming is carried on in this region, and the country is covered with a dense growth of scrub oak.

---

¹Whoever wishes to see something of iron mining in Minnesota should make a short trip from Little Falls or Staples to Crosby or Ironton, on the Duluth line. The Pennington mine, which is within easy walking distance of either of these towns, consists of a large open pit from which the glacial drift was first stripped away and the ore then mined by steam shovels. The ore is hematite, an iron oxide, and has resulted from the deep weathering or decomposition of a slaty sedimentary rock that was originally rich in iron carbonate. The sedimentary rocks strike about N. 50° E., are folded closely, and dip at high angles. The workable deposits are vertical or steeply dipping lenses, which generally have a maximum width of 400 or 500 feet and an average depth of about 300 feet, but the maximum known depth is about 1,000 feet. Some of the lenses extend for more than half a mile along the strike. The ores, some of which are soft and some hard, are in the main non-Bessemer—that is, they contain too much phosphorus to be converted into steel by the Bessemer process, which is one of the processes generally used. Some of the ores contain considerable manganese.

The traveler wishing to make a more extended excursion into the iron country may go from Little Falls or Staples to Duluth and take either the Duluth, Missabe & Northern Railway or the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad to one of the great iron-producing towns on the Mesabi range. This range is about 100 miles long and 1 to 3 miles wide. The most productive part is served by a trolley line which runs between Hibbing and Eveleth, making all the mining towns between easily accessible. The Hull-Rust open pit at Hibbing is the largest iron mine in the world, producing in 1913 nearly 3,500,000 long tons of ore. A description of the iron ranges is given by W. H. Emmons, State geologist of Minnesota, in the following paragraphs:

The iron ore of the Mesabi (me-sah'be) and Cuyuna ranges is contained in the Biwabik (be-wah'bick) formation, named from one of the iron-mining towns in the Mesabi range. This formation consists of ferruginous cherts, iron ores, slates, iron silicate, and carbonate rocks, with a small amount of coarse detrital material at its base. It grades upward and in places laterally into more slaty rocks, known as the Virginia slate; and it is underlain by the Pokegama quartzite, consisting mainly of quartzite but containing also conglomerate at its base. These three formations are generally known as the Animikie (a-nim'i-kee) group and belong in the upper part of the Algonkian system as exposed in this region. All these rocks were laid down after the close folding which affected the lower Algonkian rocks, consequently the formations of the Animikie group are not on edge but generally dip at low angles.

The Biwabik or iron-bearing formation extends along the Mesabi range (see map on sheet 2, p. 26) for its entire length. Its average thickness is about 800 feet, but owing to the prevailing low dips the width exposed varies from a quarter of a mile to 3 miles. The great bulk of the formation is ferruginous (iron-bearing) chert, with varying amounts of amphibole (asbestos), some lime and iron carbonates, and bands and shoots of iron ore. Associated with the chert, mainly in the middle zone, is the iron ore, which occupies about 5 per cent of the total surface area of the formation. Throughout the iron-bearing formation, particularly in its upper part, are thin layers of slate and paint rock, the paint rock usually resulting from the alteration of the slate.

At the east end of the range, near Birch Lake, the iron formation has been considerably metamorphosed in consequence of the intrusion of granite to the north and of gabbro to the south. As a result considerable amphibole has been developed in the ferruginous rocks, magnetite has segregated into layers, and the rocks have become hardened.

Thin beds of conglomerate and shale of Cretaceous age, lying nearly horizontal, cap the various Algonkian and Archean formations. The basal beds of the Cretaceous locally carry detrital iron ore derived from the weathered Biwabik formation.

Only small portions of the Biwabik formation are rich enough to constitute iron ore. These occur in isolated masses along the eroded surface of the formation and are generally not over 200 feet thick, although some are thicker. The workable deposits are secondary concentrations due to the action of surface waters, which have leached out the silica and some other elements and have left the iron in a more highly concentrated form. Concentration of this nature, in places to which water solutions have found more ready access, has been going on through long geologic periods. That it was well advanced in Cretaceous time is shown in the detrital zone of the Cretaceous rocks, in which iron ore is abundant in the form of polished pebbles.

The geologic conditions in the Cuyuna range appear to be almost identical with those in the Mesabi range, described above, but as the Cuyuna range has been only slightly developed its geology can not yet be described in detail.

---

For some distance beyond Randall the country consists largely of swamps and scrub-oak uplands, but north of Cushing the surface becomes rougher, consisting of knoblike hills with swamps or lakes between them. When seen from some commanding eminence the country appears to be a maze of more or less regular conical hills among which the railway turns and twists to find a level pathway. As the traveler proceeds he will note that the depressions between the hills become more pronounced, and when he is within a mile of Lincoln, or at milepost 126, he can see on his right one of the largest depressions in the region, occupied by Lake Alexander. Evidently the character of the submerged surface is much the same as that around the lake, for the surface of the lake, although extensive, is broken by morainic islands that add greatly to the charm of the scene.

The rough topography reaches its culmination near Lincoln, where the hills range in height from 100 to 150 feet and are very steep. As described in the footnote on pages 26—30, the morainic material forming these hills was brought by a great glacier (the middle ice sheet) that pushed into this region from the northeast. It extended only a little beyond Mississippi River, and the rough topography about Lincoln is due to the deposition of a part of its terminal moraine.

Lincoln is mainly a summer resort and is an attractive place for those who enjoy boating and other aquatic sports. The wooded islands in Lake Alexander afford an almost unlimited number of camping places and sites for summer cottages.

The strong morainic topography continues for several miles beyond Lincoln but gradually becomes more subdued, and even the gently rolling ground that is noticeable around Philbrook soon gives place to a country that is flat and swampy as far as the eye can see. Philbrook is supposed to stand on the dividing line between the red drift of the middle ice sheet and the gray drift of the western sheet, but no distinction between the two drift sheets can be observed from the car window.

From Philbrook the land continues flat and swampy to Staples, which is a division point and one of the main junctions on the railway. Here the line from St. Paul joins the original main line of the Northern Pacific from Duluth.¹ The country west of Staples is as flat as that to the south, over which the traveler has just passed, and as far as the eye can see there are no hills to break the monotony of flat and swamp. The railway follows, in general, the valley of Leaf River, which lies north of the track.

---

¹As early as 1853 the Government made a survey to determine the best location for a Pacific railroad, and one of the routes examined and recommended is practically that which the Northern Pacific follows, but after the survey was made the undertaking seemed so great that capital could not be found with which to make even a beginning. On the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 the faith of the public in the success of transcontinental roads seems to have revived, and in 1870 the construction of the Northern Pacific line was actually begun. Work was started at the two extremities—near Duluth, which was to be the eastern terminus, and between Kalama, on Columbia River, and Tacoma, the western terminus in Washington. In Minnesota the rails were laid in 1870 as far as Brainerd, on Mississippi River, 30 miles east of Staples, and in 1871 were extended entirely across the State.

At that time Duluth, on account of its location on one of the Great Lakes, was considered the most desirable place to connect with the East. Duluth is a convenient port for the westward traffic in coal and other heavy materials and for grain shipments eastward to the seaboard, but it then stood in a great wilderness, without railway communication and at the head of a lake closed to navigation by ice for five months of the year. The Northern Pacific Co. early recognized that water transportation was losing its importance and that in the future St. Paul, with its unlimited possibilities of railroad connection with Chicago, was the natural eastern terminus of the road. Accordingly negotiations for a line to St. Paul were undertaken.

Sometime between 1864 and 1870 a railroad was built from St. Paul up Mississippi River to Sauk Rapids by an independent company. This line was purchased by the Northern Pacific Co. in 1870 with the understanding that the road was to be completed to Brainerd, where it would connect with the main line of that system. In the panic of 1873 the Northern Pacific could not fulfill its obligations and so lost control of this line. The road was completed to Brainerd on November 1, 1877, by other persons, and it afforded the first railroad connection between the Northern Pacific line and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The Northern Pacific Co. leased this line in 1878 and later acquired control of it through the purchase of its capital stock. Still later the company built the road from Little Falls to Staples, giving it the through connection desired.

---