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Updated: May 31, 2025
For many a long, sunshiny mile it had come floating placidly eastward, issuing from the great water-shed of the continent, drifting leisurely between low-lying, grassy banks all criss-crossed with ancient buffalo-trails, or the recent footprints of long-horned cattle, past the broad plateau, crowded by the wooden walls of Fort Ransom, past the roofs and spires of bustling Butte, a prairie metropolis, a railway and cattle town that rivalled Braska, past long miles of gleaming tangents of the transcontinental railway until it met the bold bluffs east of Alkali Station and was shouldered from its course and sent on long, tortuous détour to the northeast, until, beyond the great reservation of the red men in the loveliest hill country of the wild frontier, it once more turned sharply eastward at the point described in the sonorous language of the plains as "the Big Bend of the Mina Ska."
It is almost on the crest of the hill on the south bank of the Marne, the hill that is the water-shed between the Marne and the Grand Morin. Just here the Marne makes a wonderful loop, and is only fifteen minutes walk away from my gate, down the hill to the north. From the lawn, on the north side of the house, I command a panorama which I have rarely seen equaled.
The town stands, at the height of 2200 feet above the sea, on the banks of the Macquarie. This is one of the rivers flowing into the vast and scarcely known interior. The line of water-shed, which divides the inland streams from those on the coast, has a height of about 3000 feet, and runs in a north and south direction at the distance of from eighty to a hundred miles from the sea-side.
The Macquarie figures in the map as a respectable river, and it is the largest of those draining this part of the water-shed; yet to my surprise I found it a mere chain of ponds, separated from each other by spaces almost dry. Generally a small stream is running; and sometimes there are high and impetuous floods.
On account of the narrow water-shed separating the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers at that point, the stream must be insignificant at ordinary stages, but when we were there, in February, it was a torrent. It would facilitate the investment of Fort Henry materially if the troops could be landed south of that stream.
In High German it is "Wasser-scheide," i.e. water-parting; in Low German it is "Water-shed," with the same meaning, thus making our own term perfectly clear. "Low" German, of course, only means the dialect spoken in the low-lying North German plains: "High" German, the language spoken in the hilly country south of the Harz Mountains.
Then there are some who only view a brook as affording variety to the pursuit of the fox, and who pride themselves on their knowledge of the spots at which it can be most successfully leaped. Others, again, who are of a geographical turn of mind, can only see in a brook a necessary portion of the water-shed of the district.
'I can see out of the mouth of the gorge from here, he said, as he stood on the summit, 'and by the look of the country you're about right as to the course of this brook. We're the other side of the water-shed altogether. Ken clambered up beside him.
This region is notable for the great lake system, and the immense number of smaller lakes and ponds natural inland reservoirs, supposed to be largely of glacial formation to hold back considerable portions of the cumulative waters upon any given water-shed, and serving to restrain the outflow, even after they are filled. These basins exercise a happy and protective influence in many ways.
We may suppose that the gravel containing the flint hatchet at Precy is of the same age as that of Chauny, with which it is continuous, and that both of them are coeval with the tool-bearing beds of Amiens, for the basins of the Oise and the Somme are only separated by a narrow water-shed, and the same fossil quadrupeds occur in both.
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