The bed of the Mississippi River is hundreds, even thousands, of feet deep in silt. The Columbia and the Missouri flow over alluvial wash as thick as Arctic glaciers. On the Colorado, however, to everyone’s amazement, bedrock was struck at forty feet. A milled piece of sawtimber was found resting at the bottom of the muck, obviously of very recent origin. Since white men had begun to settle the region, perhaps eighty years before, a huge flood had evidently washed the entire channel clean. No one seemed bothered by the certainty that all of the silt constantly being relocated along the entire
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