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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (29814)	6/24/1999 12:21:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

The Mississippi, like all rivers, runs where the gradient of resistance is lowest, I think is the fancy way to say it, and the regular way to say is that water runs downhill, and it prefers to run down whatever is the steepest decline. So after all the mud from the east of the Continental Divide gets washed down into Louisiana, and silts up the river bed, the Mississippi starts flowing through a different channel. The same maps I saw at L.S.U. 25 years ago showed that the mouth of the Mississippi has been as far west as Texas and as far east as Mississippi, the state. It whips around like a headless snake, or a garden hose, but over a scale of time that takes centuries. BTW, I strongly recommend John McPhee's essay on the Mississippi, published in the New Yorker, and collected with two other essays in The Control of Nature. The battle between the United States Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River is heroic.

To: Ish who wrote (29814)	6/24/1999 12:30:00 PM
From: DScottD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Actually, Ish, the town was Kaskaskia and it was the first state capital of Illinois. The capital then moved to Vandalia and eventually to Springfield in the 1830s. Lincoln was one of the legislators responsible for ramrodding the relocation of the capital to Springfield.

To: Ish who wrote (29814)	6/24/1999 4:01:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

The Illinois basin is huge and thousands of feet deep. I've studied the geological map, and there are six thick layers of coal underneath my farm in Cumberland county. Coal outcrops in the South and East and West and North of the state. It usually high-sulfur but a very great resource. My farm, at least the forest and hills, are full of 4-6ft rocks pulled down from the Laurentian shield in Canada by the Illinoisian glacier. Unfortunately, the Wisconsinin, whose soils make Illinois so fertile, stops just South of Charleston 20 miles North of me. Southern Illinois is poor, heavily oxidized hard-pan soil, poor land and poor people. Central Illinois is the bean basket of the world. Now if we could just get back to $9/bu once and a while.

To: Ish who wrote (29814)	6/24/1999 11:01:00 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

The Mississippi used to run where the Illinois does now. Ice age or something changed it. As the glaciers covering northeast North America melted off, the Great Lakes were for a time one giant lake which drained to the south through the Mississippi, Illinois, Wabash, and I think, the Miami and Scioto, and upper Ohio valleys. There was an earthquake in the 1800s that made the Mississippi run backwards for days creating Reelfoot Lake. It also cut around a town and made it an island closer to Missouri than Illinois. At one time the town had been considered for the state capital. You're talking about the New Madrid earthquake(s) in 1812. There's an interesting book on the subject published by a couple of professors at SEMO in Cape Girardeau, David Stewart and Ray Knox, entitled The Earthquake That Never Went Away (it details earthquake features which remain today - sandboils, bluffs, and of course, Reelfoot Lake). There was also a waterfall created on the Mississippi at the time, though it quickly eroded away. Also on the subject of the Mississippi moving, I know at one time the river went through the Thebes cutoff and flowed through southeast Missouri and eastern Arkansas. The Ohio turned south at the present location of Cairo and the two rivers joined somewhere around Memphis. I'm not sure what caused the movement of the Mississippi into it's present bed between Thebes and Cairo. Perhaps that was caused by an earlier earthquake(?). The quakes they have in this region today are very mild, though there will be another big one someday.