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Show 1836- 1837] Fogg's Far West 103 Ohio, betray palpable indication of having once been swept by the stream; and the fantastic excavations and cavernous fissures which their bold escarpments expose would indicate a current far more furious and headstrong than that, resistless though it be, which now rolls at their base. The idea receives confirmation from the circumstance that opposite extends the broad American Bottom, whose alluvial character is undisputed. This tract once constituted our western border, whence the name. The bluffs of Selma and Herculaneum are distinguished for their beauty and grandeur, not less than for the practical utility to which they have been made subservient. Both places are great depositories of lead from the mines of the interior, and all along their cliffs, for miles, upon every eligible point, are erected tall towers for the manufacture of shot. Their appearance in distant view is singularly picturesque, perched lightly upon the pinnacles of towering cliffs, beetling over the flood, which rushes along two hundred feet below. Some of these shot manufactories have been in operation [ 75] for nearly thirty years. M Herculaneum has long been celebrated for those in her vicinity. The situation of the town is the mouth of Joachim Creek; and the singular gap at this point has been aptly compared to an enormous door, thrown open in the cliffs for the passage of its waters. A few miles west of this village is said to exist a great natural curiosity, in shape of a huge M For location and date of settlement of Herculaneum, see Maximilian's Travels, in our volume xxii, p. 212, note 122. On a perpendicular bluff, more than a hundred feet in height, in the vicinity of Herculaneum, J. Macklot erected ( 1809) what was probably the first shot- tower this side of the Atlantic. The next year one Austin built another tower at the same point. According to H. R. Schoolcraft in his View of the Lead Mines of Missouri ( New York, 1819), pp. 138, 139, there were in 1817 three shot- towers near Herculaneum, producing in the eighteen months ending June z of that year, 668,350 pounds of shot From the top of small wooden towers erected on the edge of the bhxff, the melted lead was poured through holes in copper pans or sieves.- ED. |