Date: late 1890s

 

Description: This page comes from one of a series of books published by the members of the Iowa Geological Survey in the late 1890s. These books covered the geology of all of Iowa’s counties. One of the members of the survey, H. Foster Bain, wrote the section covering the geology of Woodbury County and Sioux City. This is a drawing of a sample that Bain and his contemporaries took while they were studying loess deposits in the region. The cross-section drawn here gives a clear impression of how loess and sediment were deposited at Riverside Park, in a sand pit opposite the railway station. Apart from this stretch of the Midwest, loess deposits are found only one other place in the world: eastern China.

 

Donor: Sioux City Academy of Science and Letters