Ferdinand Hayden's 1868 survey of the Wyoming and adjacent territories was a small, largely ignored survey; but it was important to the history of geology and the American West. The discovery of new material related to Hayden's 1868 survey, including a personal diary of one of the assistants on the survey, James Carson, provides critical information that allows the survey's story to be fully articulated and analyzed for the first time. Most of the expedition's activities took place in southern Wyoming and were closely intertwined with one of the most noteworthy events in U.S. history—the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad's construction activities caused Hayden to have serendipitous encounters with legendary army generals, businessmen, politicians, photographers, geologists, and thieves, many of whom significantly changed the course and scope of the survey. Some of these people included James Hall, General John Gibbon, Frank Blair, Louis Agassiz, Thomas Durant, and William Gilpin. Despite severe underfunding and the lack of a military escort, the survey persevered and surpassed its original goals. It produced the first descriptive stratigraphic-structural profile across the Rocky Mountains from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City and, somewhat unknowingly, the first documentation of dinosaur tracks in western North America. The overall success of the expedition allowed Hayden to expand his surveys and helped solidify his reputation as an important pioneering American geologist. However, the field reports of the survey and Hayden's zeal to appease important people may have helped to prevent his hoped-for appointment as the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

ABSTRACT Lead and zinc ore minerals occur in the middle Ordovician Sinnipee Group dolomites in southwest Wisconsin and adjacent areas of northwest Illinois and northeast Iowa. Europeans began mining lead deposits as early as the mid-1600s; production of lead ore and smelting of lead reached a peak ca. 1850. Mining and production from the stratigraphically lower zinc deposits reached a peak in 1917, with a lesser resurgence of zinc production ca. 1950–1970. The mining detritus and sediment from mine waste piles is relatively stable. However, cations of lead and zinc freely adsorb to clay and silt particles and have been incorporated into the downstream fluvial systems. The temporal coincidence of lead-zinc mining and active aggradation of many fluvial systems in the Driftless Area has resulted in these “legacy sediments” being preserved in overbank fluvial deposits throughout the Lead-Zinc District.

ABSTRACT The Driftless Area is a region of roughly 22,000 km 2 almost entirely in southwestern Wisconsin and adjacent northwestern Illinois that contains no evidence for glaciation during the Quaternary. Both in terms of topography and geomorphic process, it stands in stark contrast to the surrounding glaciated landscapes of the Midwestern United States. The nearly flat-lying Paleozoic sedimentary rocks in the region are deeply incised by the dendritic drainage system of the upper Mississippi and lower Wisconsin Rivers and numerous of their tributaries. Records of geologic processes that predate the Quaternary glaciations are exposed at the near-surface. The landscape is blanketed by loess of the Kieler Formation and was affected by mass wasting and a range of periglacial processes that were pervasive during permafrost conditions that existed between 33 and 14 ka. Post-glacial fluvial systems preserve myriad examples of channel adjustment to changes in sediment supply from the transition of glacial to interglacial conditions, changes in discharge across periods of Holocene climate change, and responses to Euro-American settlement of the landscape.

ABSTRACT This paper presents an overview of the human prehistory of the Driftless Area of the Upper Mississippi Valley as revealed through archaeological research. Discussion begins with the earliest evidence of human occupation over 13,000 yr ago and concludes just prior to the arrival of European traders and missionaries in the seventeenth century.

Over the course of his 43-year career, James C. Knox conducted seminal research on the geomorphology of the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin. His research covered wide-ranging topics such as long-term landscape evolution in the Driftless Area; responses of floods to climate change since the last glaciation; processes and timing of floodplain sediment deposition on both small streams and on the Mississippi River; impacts of European settlement on the landscape; and responses of stream systems to land-use changes. This volume presents the state of knowledge of the physical geography and geology of this unglaciated region in the otherwise-glaciated Midwest with contributions written by Knox prior to his passing in 2012 and by a number of his former colleagues and graduate students.