Lower Illinois Valley: Color Me Greene (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Lower Illinois Valley: Color Me Greene

Mississippi Rivers over this distance and a strip of land 10 or 15 miles wide on the east side ofthe Illinois River.

The Illinois River Valley, which is broad and steep sided, is oriented almost exactly north south; it has been cut through Mississippian limestone and varies in width from about to 5 miles. The valley is clearly defined by nearly perpendicular limestone bluffs that extend along on both sides of its length; the bluffs are broken only where tributaries, secondary streams which intersect and flow into the Illinois, have cut their own valleys. The river, which is broad and slow moving on a gentle gradient, frequently flooded before construction of flood-control levees. Natural levees occur in many places in the bottom lands and are associated with the river's course and with older fossil riverbeds. Long, low, sand ridges lying roughly parallel to the present river bed, extend over virtually the entire length of the valley. The river now follows the western side of the valley quite closely; between the river and the eastern bluff is an alluvial bottomland, 3 to 5 miles wide. Before being drained, this zone supported a dense growth of water-tolerant trees and included numerous esters and shallow lakes. It covers the entire area of the valley between the bluffs except for a narrow terrace along the eastern bluff which was prehistorically a zone of wet prairie.

The talus slope of the bluffs is today, and was in the past, covered by an oak-hickory forest which also covers the slopes of tributary valleys on both sides of the river. Above the secondary valleys, ex tending away from the river for as much as several miles, is a heavily dissected landscape that once supported heavy forest, again predominantly of the oak-hickory type. East of the Illinois River, this for est gave way to high grass prairie; continuous forest probably extended between the two major rivers at least as far north as the north end of Pike County.

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