St Anthony Falls Essay

Introduction.

Saint Anthony Falls, known as the birthplace of Minneapolis, is located northeast of downtown Minneapolis. Since it is the highest and only true waterfall on the entire Mississippi River, St Anthony Falls have become an important cartographic landmark in the interior of North America. The Falls was called “Minirara”, which means ‘curling water’, when it was first discovered by the Dakota Tribe. It was then renamed to Saint Anthony Falls by Louis Hennepin, the first European visited the place, after his patron saint Anthony of Padua.

II. Environmental forces on St Anthony Falls.

St Anthony was originally a part of the big River Warren Falls, which was about twenty-seven hundred feet across and one hundred seventy-five feet high,

Unlike other waterfalls, St Anthony Falls did not retreat through the erosion of the hard layer of rock. Instead, it collapsed as meter-wide blocks of rock fell, crashing into the river. The soft sandstone disappeared at the bottom of the falls because of the turbulent water, caused the hard limestone cap in chunks to break as the falls retreated. As the Falls locates in the middle of North America and does not receive enough warmth from the ocean, the area surrounding the Falls experiences many types of extreme weather, including high speed winds, blizzards, and

Timber, flour, hydroelectricity had become an economic promise of St. Anthony Falls. By the middle of 1800s, as the Europeans recognized the valuable power of the Falls, several mills and barracks were built along the river. Lumbermen and millers began looking to the falls as the resources of hydropower for saw mills and flour mills; making Minneapolis the first in the nation in flour production and third in lumber. () By 1839, the Falls’ energy was fully employed for timber, as this upper river area provided seventy percent of Minnesota’s conifers and