|
Christopher
Columbus stared out across the ocean, beginning to think there was
no end in sight. Farmers sitting on their tractors, looking out
over the prairie probably think the same thing. They may all believe:
The end of the world may be right over the edge.
About 14,000 years ago, a glacier
covered the Red River Basin. Today, the Red River Valley exists
in what was the southern portion of Glacier Lake Agassiz and what
is now the center of Red River Basin. According to the Minnesota
Pollution Control Agency, the Red River Valley stretches from 315
miles south by Lake Traverse to Lake Winnipeg in the north. It is
about 60 miles wide.
Many people from the area—or
those just visiting—may feel like North Dakota is the end of
the world. The flatness and the prairies influenced several poets
to write about how vague the land can seem.
In the poem “Early Cutting”
by Roland Flint, he describes the land as it is now. He compares
our land as being so flat that it was the end of the world, much
like Columbus might have felt while discovering America.
|
Where they call it the Red River
Valley of the North
there are no mountains,
the floor is wide as
a glacial lake—Agassiz,
the fields go steady to the
horizon,
sunflower, potato,
summerfallow, corn,
and so flat that a shallow ditch
can make tractor drivers think
of Columbus
and the edge.
|
|
Flint
was born in Park River, N.D., in 1934. He lived in the area
and received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University
of North Dakota. He moved to Washington, D.C., and taught at
Georgetown University for almost 30 years. He died Jan. 2, 2001.
Another local poet, Mark Vinz,
has written a couple poems that describe how he views North
Dakota and the effect Lake Agassiz has had on the land. In his
poem “Long, Long Ago,” Vinz describes the lakeland's
desolate outlook.
I
live in a dry lakebed,
flat
and literal ...
still
listen to ships passing,
though
there aren't many.
|
|
“If
you understand that, you understand my fascination,” says Vinz,
English professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead. “I’ve
done no research, only used the reference a couple times in poems.”
Before the glacier, the land was quite sparse,
says Russell Colson, Minnesota State University Moorhead professor
of anthropology and earth science. Although there were a limited
number of living things in the area before the glacier, anthropologists
found insects that can determine the change in the climate.
“There weren’t many fossils in
the lake itself,” Colson says. “There aren’t so many
fish because it was so cold. It was a lot like it is today in any
other arctic place.”
Many years before the glacier, about half-way
back to the dinosaur age, the Red River Valley area was considered
a semi-tropical climate. Swamps and semi-tropical forest existed.
The climate was a lot like Florida, Colson says.
“Leaf fossils have been found
in North Dakota that are from tropical plants,” he says.
As the glacier began to melt, Lake Agassiz
formed. Lake Agassiz was named in 1879 after Swiss-born naturalist
and geologist Louis Agassiz, who conducted extensive studies on
the movement of glaciers, according to the MPCA.
The glacier caused a dam in the river, said
Colson. The lake drained through the Minnesota River to the Mississippi
River. The melting was pretty fast, not gradual. It was short, geologically
speaking.
“Lake Agassiz was the most significant
to our area in the early stages,” Colson says. “[The lake]
caused the Moorhead Delta. As it melted back, it found other outlets.”
As the water cleared, the Cheyenne River
became one of the major rivers at the time, he said. It was as large
as the Mississippi River is in New Orleans.
Before the glacier, there were animals and
humans roaming the earth.
According to Kevin Callahan, a member of
the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota, large-bodied
animals like the wholly mammoth, wild horses and giant bison adapted
to the cold environment. North American mammoths lived on open prairies
from Minnesota to the Southwest and were the largest of all mammoths.
They drank 40 gallons of water and ate 600 pounds of vegetation
a day. A mammoth would provide over a ton of meat.
Dakota, or Sioux, Native Americans lived
in central or western Minnesota. Assiniboins were found in northeast
Minnesota, and Cheyenne were found in the lower Red River, Callahan
said on his Web site. In 1931, a highway crew working on a road
in Pelican Rapids, Otter Tail County, in western Minnesota, came
across the bones of a Minnesota man. The remains have now been renamed
the “Minnesota Woman” after re-examination of the bones.
Vinz expressed his feeling the presence
of the past in a poem entitled “Living on the Edge of Dakota”:
A
stopping place, a far country,
an ancient lakebed where the
grandfathers are never still."
So what caused the glacier in
the first place?
“It got cold,” Colson
said with smile.
|
|
The
earth tilts; it changes position over much time, Colson said.
Sunlight strikes the earth at different times as the earth
changes its position. This could cause the extended amount
of coldness to cause a glacier. This is the most widely accepted
theory.
Other theories include the
world’s chemistry and changes in ocean currents distributing
energy. For instance, when El Ninõ and other weather
catastrophes occur, this can cause weather changes all the
way through the Red River Valley.
|
“Little
things far away can have a big effect you wouldn’t predict,”
he said.
“The only fascination [with Lake Agassiz] is the imagination
that we live on the bottom of an ancient lake is mind-blowing,”
said Vinz.
|
By imperceptible degrees
on sky-wide steppes the road
ascends
past grain, grass, hedgerows,
isles of trees.
An undulant horizon bends
loosely about us we reach
each buried sandbar that contains
the glacial Agassiz that drains
from beach to prehistoric beach.
Highway 10, Minnesota
—Mary Pryor
|
|
|
|
|
