The trail of the Loup; being a history of the Loup River region . land areas took place and salt water by degrees submerged the lowlands, destroying every vestige of the late prolific vegetation. Thus, wemay picture the old peat-marsh, with its bottom lull of stumps and rootsin position as they grew, with its surface covered over with heaps of leaves,branches and prostrate tree trunks, to have been overwhelmed and to enormous pressure from accumulating top sediment andslow chemical change, it, in time, became one of the several coal submergance and emergance
The trail of the Loup; being a history of the Loup River region . land areas took place and salt water by degrees submerged the lowlands, destroying every vestige of the late prolific vegetation. Thus, wemay picture the old peat-marsh, with its bottom lull of stumps and rootsin position as they grew, with its surface covered over with heaps of leaves,branches and prostrate tree trunks, to have been overwhelmed and to enormous pressure from accumulating top sediment andslow chemical change, it, in time, became one of the several coal submergance and emergance of the surface crust readily explainsthe alternation, in these rockbeds, of coal seams with layers of sandstones,conglomerate, shales, clays and limestones. The second and largest coalmeasures of this age extends from Texas and Arkansas northward throughKansas and Missouri, Nebraska and Iowa. The westward boundary isnear the central part of Kansas, and crosses the state line into Nebraskanear the banks of the Blue River, whence it takes a northeasterly trend,. M^ fr:^^^ :**? 20 THE TRAIL OF THE LOUP leaving the state in southern Washington county. It will thus be seenthat part or the whole of some twelve counties in our state overlie these in-teresting beds. In Richardson county a workable stratum has been en-countered, though borings at Lincoln and other places seem to indicatethat profitable mines should not be looked for in Nebraska. The closing period of the Paleozoic aeon was the Per-mian Age, in which the ocean once more prevailed, thoughwith gradually contracting limits. The greater part of Ne-braska was yet a part of the ocean bed, covered by turbulentwaters. On stormy days the breakers must have roaredalong the shore and hurled their spray against the limestonecliffs now marked by a line drawn from Beatrice in Gagecounty to Blair in Washington county. Some fifteen of ourpresent day counties in southeast Nebraska had by this timelifted their surface above the waters; a
Size: 1209px × 2068px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookauthorfoghthwh, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookyear1906
