The Driftless Area

A quite large region of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa along the Mississippi River is now called the “driftless area”, an area which escaped the last glaciation period. In this area the glacier was diverted by an uplifted area of rock which prevented the deposits of silt, clay, sand, gravel and boulders that glaciers usually leave. Thus the towering limestone and sandstone bluffs, rolling hills and streams on both sides of the Mississippi in this area have a ruggedness not softened by drift.

The names in the area reflect its cultural history, from the native Americans names (Ojibwe-Chippewa, Wyandot-Huron, Sauk, Pawnee, Ioway, Dakota-Sioux and Omaha), to those of the French explorers and missionaries, such as Father Jacque Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who first came down the Mississippi from the north. Competition between the French and the British for the fur trade drove much of this early exploration. The French controlled the land along the Mississippi River.

When we moved into the “driftless area”, it was called “the Little Switzerland of Iowa” because the hills and bluffs weren’t common to the rest of the state. It began to be farmed in the mid 1800’s when European settlers moved in. Farming and grazing practices contributed to erosion and flooding, but quite early on this was recognized and attempts were made to control it, especially to keep the Mississippi shipping lanes from filling up with silt! Along the Mississippi itself, much of the land is maintained as parks, forests and wildlife management areas.

My parents were amateur naturalists and quite curious, so we did quite a lot of sightseeing when we first moved into the area. We investigated the caves, springs and palisades along the river, and watched the operations of the locks on the Mississippi, which allowed vessels to "step" up or down the river from one water level to another. We went to see the mounds near the river in the shapes of bear and birds, ceremonial and sacred sites built by the Effigy Mound Builders more than a thousand years ago. We visited the Bily Clock museum in Spillville (see detail of carving by Frank and Joseph Bily) and the Villa Louis, a home first built by a wealthy fur trader and maintained as a museum in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

The “driftless area” was a stark contrast from the Red River Valley in North Dakota, the floodplain of an early glacial lake, flat as a pancake and open to the wind and weather systems of the Great Plains.