History of Fort Dodge and Webster County, Iowa
Table of Contents
Read the Book - Free Download the Book - Free ( 30.0 MB PDF ) VOLUME II
Read the Book - Free Download the Book - Free ( 13.9 MB PDF ) This chapter aims to present briefly the history of the growth and development of Webster county's rock formations and surface features. In order to correctly understand the landscape of today we must know the forces which have been at work building up massive beds of rock and clay and gravel, those which have chiseled out the hills and the valleys as the artist carves his statue or molds his model, those which have made the crooked ways straight and the rough places plain, have cut down the hills and filled up the valleys. So we must go back, not to the beginning, indeed, but far back to the time when life had its beginnings, uncounted ages ago, and we shall find that even then the same forces and agents were at work which are today effective in giving our world its present form. The rivers carried to the oceans their burdens washed from the land, the winds did their work, mighty volcanoes poured out their floods of molten rock and under the seas were being laid down the foundations of the future continents. Nothing could be further from the truth than the current conception that the forms of nature which we see about us are fixed and unchangeable. |