We are investigating abandoned valleys parallel to the upper Mississippi River, in the Red Wing – Lake Pepin – Trempealeau reach: the valleys behind Barn Bluff (Red Wing, MN), by Frontenac, along Hay Creek, and in the broad area around Trempealeau, WI.
This repository collects the relevant primary-source literature as searchable OCR text, with an annotated bibliography and a script to fetch the original page-image PDFs.
Several late-19th- and early-20th-century workers described the glacial-age history of this reach:
- Squier (1884) — reports bluff-top land-snail shells and wave-worked rubble near Trempealeau as evidence of submergence of even the highest land, ~500 ft above the river (a reading he later revised).
- Grant & Burchard (1907), USGS Folio 145 — describe the valley as filled with 125+ ft of glacial outwash over a buried bedrock gorge, with the lower courses of tributaries backfilled.
- Martin (1916) — attributes the isolated rock hills (Trempealeau Mountain; the Red Wing / Lake Pepin hills) to the aggraded Mississippi shifting onto its fill and into the tributary valleys, and reads the terraces as recording tilting about a hinge line near La Crosse.
The full annotated bibliography — citations, source URLs, key quotations, and notes on
further candidate papers examined (Carman 1909, Clem 1910, Schoewe 1923, Sardeson 1933) —
is in literature/README.md.
literature/— OCR text of the primary sources plus the annotated bibliography.literature/fetch_pdfs.sh— downloads the original page-image PDFs (not committed, to keep the repository small).
All primary sources collected here were published in 1923 or earlier and are in the public domain in the United States.
Original content in this repository (the notes and the annotated bibliography) is licensed
CC-BY-4.0 (see LICENSE). The primary sources are in the public domain.