| Summary: | THE RED RIVER VALLEY OF NORTH AMERICA The Red River Valley is much larger than most people realize. It extends westward from the Red River 25 to 40 miles and east from the river about the same distance. From the south in northeastern South Dakota it widens to 250 miles in Canada and includes the rich soil of southern Manitoba. Half of the Red River Valley is in the United States and half is in Canada. To Canadians it is known as Southern Manitoba as well as Red River Valley. The section south of the border and east of the river is designated Northwestern Minnesota. Only the North Dakota quarter west of the river is and always has been known as Red River Land. While the eastern border of North Dakota is measured at about 200 miles, the distance to Winnipeg via the meandering river is about 400 miles. The width of the valley averages about 100 miles. The river from which the valley gets its name extends from a lake in the extreme northeast corner of South Dakota, Lake Traverse, whose outlet in the north is the Bois des Sioux River. The Bois des Sioux runs north to Wahpeton- Breckenridge, where joined by the Ottertail River flowing from the east it forms the Red River. The Red River empties into Lake Winnipeg and the waters then drain into Hudson Bay via the Hayes and Nelson Rivers. Geologists describe the Red River Valley as a prairie lake bed. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, during one of the cold periods that affected the world, a blanket of snow hundreds of feet deep fell and continued to fall over countless centuries. Finally a sheet of ice, a glacier, covered all of Canada and the northern part of the United States. It alternately melted and grew again until the ice mass was a mile thick. Glaciers move and advance slowly. One finger of the glacier advanced down through the whole of eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota. This mighty mass of moving ice pried off rocks, picked up boulders, gravel, soil, trees and shrubs and carried everything before it. It gouged out a valley and filled it with ice. During a warming period, perhaps 10,000 years ago, the glacier gradually melted and left in its wake huge quantities of water. The atmosphere was very humid and torrential rains fell. All this water from melting ice created a huge lake spreading over 110,000 square miles, a lake larger than all the Great Lakes combined. It has been determined that the lake was 100 feet deep at Wahpeton, 200 feet deep at Fargo and 450 feet deep at Pembina. Storms of rain and wind created huge waves which washed sand and gravel to the shores. Rushing water from the escarpments on the east and west carried in more water laden with drift soil together with decayed vegetation from their banks. When the turbulent lake first sought an outlet, it drained to the south through the glacial River Warren, the remains of which is the Minnesota River of today, but the stupendous weight of ice and water caused the valley to tilt to the north. Such a change in the earth's surface was not by any means infrequent during the early periods of the world's formation. Even now portions of continents are slowly rising while others are slowly falling. When the huge dam of ice in Manitoba finally broke, the lake water drained into Lake Winnipeg and on to Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. In this new rich lake bed grasses grew four to six feet tall; 210 different kinds have been identified by botanists, together with over 2,000 different kinds of plant life. They blossomed, withered and died and further enriched the soil. Into this land came the buffalo and other fauna to feed, grow old and die. Adding to this material was the natural sediment of the lake itself, the decayed fishes and multitudes of water animals, giving an animal as well as Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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