| Summary: | The Land Twin Buttes from the west The landscape around Glen Ullin is unique, so unique that the founders gave it a poetic name to mark the location. The altitute is 2067 feet above sea level with some higher buttes which mark a higher level of an older landscape. We can see that eons of time, of erosion, and other forces of nature have changed our countryside except for some of these buttes that stand as a sentinel on guard. They refuse to move because of the hardened rocks on top of them left by an ancient sea. The Heart Butte is a good example of such a sentinel. Another example is of the familiar landmark site of the Twin Buttes. Winter and summer and wet and dry years give them a different appearance but they remain to greet us as we come close to Glen Ullin. Farmers or local people in the surrounding area have put names to many of the buttes, some of which have become official names. Horseshoe Hill, Eagles Nest, Twin Buttes, Medicine Butte, Spring Butte and Clay Butte are a few of the familiar ones. The rocks give us Nature's storybook of the land. The gray pseudo-quartzite rock or mud rock is the pressure-hardened sand and clay which was at the bottom of the sea. These became a very hard rock now used in riprapping dams such as the Heart Butte and Garrison dams. Some of these pseudo-quartzite rocks have holes in them where roots of trees had been. Farmers have used these to hang on their fences to anchor the cornerposts and keep fences down in low spots. The petrified wood and coal reserves here give us a picture of a one-time tropical climate with giant redwood trees and swamps. The shale and scoria have imprints of fossils of plants and marine life of the past. This shows part of God's creation in an ever- changing earth. The granite boulders to the north of Glen Ullin are probably the oldest form of rock known to man. However, they are relatively new here, having come from the Canadian Shield, moving with the glacier, and rounding out to the sizes they are now. The early settlers in the outlying areas built their homes from the different rocks that were available. Many of these homes are still in good condition. Dakota Territory was part of an area of land that was once known as the Great American Desert. This was quite evident when the first settlers came to Glen Ullin because there was little grass, numerous sagebrush and no lakes or ponds. It was sometimes considered to be a vast, wild irreclaimable buffalo range. This has been proven to be wrong . the enterprising farmers and ranchers found it to be a rich land with the need for very little rainfall. The Dakotas have become the "Bread Basket of the World." Much of the land is tilled but there are still many native prairie areas around Glen Ullin. In some states, nature lovers travel many miles just to see native prairies. Here we have it all around us for our appreciation. Man and Nature's handiwork have truly fashioned our landscape. To give a professional understanding to the geology of Glen Ullin, Dr. Gordon Bell of Bismarck Junior College has written the following for YESTERYEARS: Geology Glen Ullin, North Dakota, is situated along the south side of a broad preglacial valley that has been eroded in the Missouri Plateau. This valley is filled with more than 100 feet of sediments that contain water and is known as the Killdeer Aquifer. Historically, this deep valley was temporarily the course of the Yellowstone River during one epoch of its diversion by the continental glacier. Yellowstone River flowed east to Curlew Valley, another preglacial trench, and thence southeast in that valley. The glacial advances from the northeast crossed Morton County and combined soil from Canada and parts of North Dakota to help produce the rich soil of the Glen Ullin region. Today, Big Muddy Creek in the partly filled trench flows east past Glen Ullin to Curlew Valley where it is joined by Hay marsh Creek, and thence southeast. Curlew Valley cuts through some of the most beautiful scoria land where ancient beds of lignite burned and baked the overlying sediments to produce the pink, yellow and red-brown scoria field. The expansive deposits of lignite represent ancient forests that spread across all of western North Dakota. Giant redwood trees mixed with at least 300 other species of trees, shrubs and plants sheltered alligators and turtles and contributed to the carbonaceous material that was progressively buried and transformed to lignite. Beneath the coal-bearing sediments of the Fort Union Group are thousands of feet of sandstone, shale and limestone, with all of their gradations. These ancient geological formations were accumulated in seas that progressively advanced and retreated from the broad Williston Basin. Now, oil, salt and sulfur are being explored and produced from these deeper sediments. Thus, Glen Ullin is influenced by beautiful earth history. 29 Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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