Page:History of Stearns County, Minnesota; volume 1.pdf/40

 about fifteen rods south from the northeast corner of this section 33. The rock is exposed also in the east bank and in the channel of the river, but its outerops rise only two or three feet above extreme low water. This is about a mile north of the high hills of rock at the east side of the river Watab.

 

Scientists tell us that in the glacial period this region was covered by the great ice sheet and then unconvered, not only once but several times. When for the last time the glacier receded, it left behind what became in a few years a wonderfully diversified and beautiful region. The realm of Stearns was and yet is where civilization has not changed it, stretches of gently rolling prairies in summer covered with grass and spangled with flowers; park-like oak openings, verdant swells of land studded with a sparse growth of oaks; dense forests of maple, oak, elm, linden and birch; poplar thickets and tamarack swamps, where every tree is of the same age and stands straight, even and orderly like a well disciplined army; jungles of underbrush of hazel and dwarf beech, dwarf hickory, ironwood, alder, kinnikinic, as well as young trees of larger species, forming in somd places almost as inpenetrable a mass as the famous jungles of the Amazon; and finally even in Stearns, here and there a little guard of conifers, mainly white pine, outposts of magnificent forests of evergreens to the northeast. And this varied landscape was fleeked and ribboned and jeweled by many a stream of water and by the matchless blue and silver lakes of Minnesota. These waters, wood and prairies fairly quivered with animal life. The most notable early animal was the mammoth. From remains found he seems to have been plentiful in Minnesota. Later the leader in animal life was the American bison, generally known as the buffalo.

A country so bountiful and inviting to man, whether primitive or civilized, would remain uninhabited only while undiscovered. J. V. Brower, the distinguished Minnesota archeologist, concludes from the finds he made of quartz artifacts near Little Falls, that man followed very close on the heels of the receding glacier.

Most scholars are of the opinion that in all probability the first inhabitants of the northern part of the United States were, or were closely related to, the Eskimo. While the data are very meager they all point that way. The Eskimos seem to have remained on the Atlantic seaboard as late as the arrival of the Scandinavian discoverers of the eleventh century, for their description of the aboringines whom they call "skrälingar" (a term of contempt about 