History of Atchison County, Kansas. Sheffield Ingalls

best citizens of the present day. Long before man ever saw Atchison county—long before man lived anywhere upon this earth, the seas swarmed with animal life and the dry lands supported a fauna and a flora substantially as great as those of the present time.

      In character the animals and plants of those early days were very different from those of the present time. Almost all of their kind long ago became extinct. It is only the few who have living representatives anywhere in the world today, and they are degraded in form and size as though they had long outlived their usefulness. Some of the animals live in the waters of distant oceans, such as the brachiopods and other shell fish; the crinoids or sea lilies, and others of like character. On the dry land we find a few insects of the cock-roach type and other creeping things which inhabit dark and damp places, animals of gloom on whose forms the sunshine of day rarely falls.

      The plants, likewise, are degraded in size and form. The modern bull-rushes of our swamps are descendants of ancient giants of their kind which grew to ten or twenty times the size of their modern representatives. The little creeping vines sometimes found in the shaded forest are lineal descendants of the mighty trees of the forests in the long ago while materials were gathering for the rock masses constituting Atchison county.

      In order to converse rationally about geological time it has been found most convenient to divide time into periods in accordance with great natural events, and to give a name to each period that in some way expresses something desirable to be known and remembered. Usually geographic names of areas where rock masses are exposed to the surface of the ground are chosen, or some favorite geographic term may be used, and in rare instances some quality name expressive of the character or composition of the rocks.

      Following the best usage of geologists the rocks exposed at the surface all belong to the age known as the Carboniferous, which lies at the top of the Palaeozoic, or ancient life rocks. The Carboniferous is divided and subdivided into a number of divisions, the lowermost of which has been named the Mississippian on account of their great abundance throughout the Mississippi valley. Above the Mississippian we find a mass of alternating beds of shale and limestone and sandstone aggregating about 2,500 feet in thickness, called the Pennsylvanians, a term borrowed from the State of Pennsylvania, where rocks of the same age so abound. Rocks formed during the remainder of geologic time are not found in Atchison county, except the covering of soil and clay so abundant throughout the county. An old-time name for the Pennsylvanian rocks is the coal-measures, a term now on the decline because the newer names—well, it is newer.

      It appears that from the close of the Pennsylvanian time to the present Atchison county has been dry land. At one time, quite recently, as geologists reckon time, climatic conditions changed so that the snow falling during the winter could not be melted during the summer, so that to the far north great quantities of snow and ice accumulated and gradually spread over the surface of a large part of North America. One limb of this ice mass moved slowly southward and covered all of Atchison county, and much adjacent territory, and brought with it vast quantities of soil and clay and gravel that the ice sheet, as a great scraper, picked up from the surface as it came along. When the ice finally melted this debris was left, like a mantle of snow, covering the entire surface of Atchison county.

      The rocks of Pennsylvanian age have within them much of value economically. Here and there inter-stratified with the sandstone and shale are large and valuable beds of coal, as is abundantly shown by the drilled wells and coal shafts within the county. It is probable that almost the entire county is underlaid with this same bed of coal, and if so it is worth substantially as much to the county as is the surface soil. It lies at so great a depth that it may be mined without any danger whatever of disturbing the surface.

      Main Building State Orphans’ Home, Atchison, Kan.

      The large amount of good hard limestone in the county guarantees an everlasting supply of stone for road making, railroad ballast, crushed rock for concrete works and all other uses to which such limestone may be put. With the Missouri river on the eastern boundary carrying unlimited amounts of sand Atchison county is well supplied with every material needed for unlimited amounts of mortar construction of all kinds. Recently, since Portland cement construction has so effectually replaced stone masonry, this becomes a very important matter.

      Should market conditions ever become favorable it is also possible to manufacture the best grades of Portland cement by properly combining the limestones and shales of the county. Their chemical and physical properties are admirably suited for such purposes.

      There is a possibility that somewhere within the county oil and gas may be found by proper prospecting. As no search for these materials has yet been made it is impossible to say what the results might be. Atchison county, however, lies within the oil zone that has been proven to be so much farther south, and until proper search has been made no one can say that oil and gas cannot be found here also.

CHAPTER II.

       PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD.

       Table of Contents

      EVIDENCES OF PALEOLITHIC MAN—AN ANCIENT FORTIFICATION—ABORIGINAL VILLAGE AND CAMP SITES—THE INGALLS AND OTHER BURIAL MOUNDS.

      How long the region embraced in Atchison county has been the home of man is not known, but the finding of a prehistoric human skeleton, computed by the highest anthropological and geological authorities to be at least 10,000 years old, in the adjoining county of Leavenworth, favors the presumption that what is now Atchison county was occupied by man at an equally remote period. Evidences of a very early human existence here have been found at various times. Near Potter, in this county, the writer found deep in the undisturbed gravel and clay, a rude flint implement that unquestionably had been fashioned by prehistoric man, evidently, of what is known as the Paleolithic period. In drilling the well at the power house of the Atchison Street Railway, Light and Power Company, the late T. J. Ingels, of Atchison, encountered at a great depth, several fragments of fossilized bone, intermingled with charcoal, evidently the remains of a very ancient fireplace. About 1880, M. M. Trimmer, an Atchison contractor, in opening a stone quarry at the northeast point of the Branchtown hill, near the confluence of White Clay and Brewery creeks, in Atchison, unexpectedly encountered a pit or excavation, eighty feet long, sixty feet wide, and eighteen feet deep, in the solid rock formation of the hill. The surface of the hill is composed of drift or gravel, and the pit had become filled with this gravel to the original surface, thus obliterating all external evidences of its existence. The lower layer of stone, about six inches thick, had been left for a floor in the pit, and in the northwest corner this lower strata of stone for about four feet square had been removed. Water issued from the ground at this point indicating that a spring or well, or source of water supply, had been located here. A careful examination of the place at the time showed unmistakably that this excavation had been made by human hands at a very early period and was probably used as a fortification or defensive work. Prehistoric excavations of this character, made in the solid rock, are common in Europe, but almost unknown in America, except in the cases of ancient flint and steatite quarries, and the absence of either in the Atchison formation, except an occasional flint nodule, precludes the possibility that this was just an aboriginal quarry. The Smithsonian authorities at Washington pronounced the work worthy of careful study, but unfortunately it was obliterated by the progress of the quarrying. Many weapons and implements of the stone age have been found in the vicinity of this pit.

      Almost the entire surface of Atchison county, particularly where bordering streams, presents various traces of aboriginal occupancy, from the silent sepulchers of the dead and the mouldy rubbish of the wigwam, to the solitary arrowhead lost on the happy chase or the sanguinary war path. In many places these remains blend into the prehistoric, semi-historic and historic periods, showing evidences of a succession of occupancy. For instance we find the Neolithic stone celts or hatchets, the Neoeric iron tomahawks; fragments of fragile earthenware, mixed and moulded by the prehistoric potter, and bits of modern decorated porcelain made by some pale-faced patterner of Palissy; ornaments of stone, bone and shell; trinkets of brass and beads of glass, intermingled in