We have other facts showing that, in this country as in Europe, man was certainly living not far from the time when the land was covered with the ice of the Glacial Age, whatever may be true of still earlier periods. We are told that, when the time came for the final breaking up of the great glaciers, and while they still lingered at the head waters of the Platte, the Missouri, and the Yellowstone rivers, a mighty lake—or, rather, a succession of lakes—occupied the greater portion of the Missouri Valley. The rivers flowing into them were of great size,38 and heavily freighted with sediment, which was deposited in the still waters of the lakes, and thus was formed the rich loess deposits of Nebraska. From several places in this loess have been taken rude stone arrows, buried at such depths and under such circumstances, that we must conclude they were deposited there when the loess was forming. But this requires us to carry them back to a time when elephants and mastodons roamed over the land, for bones of these huge creatures39 are quite frequently found. This arrow-point —or, it may be, spear-head—was found twenty feet from the surface; and almost directly above it, and distant only thirteen inches, was a vertebra of an elephant. “It appears, then, that some old races lived around the shores of this lake, and, paddling over it, accidentally dropped their arrows, or let them fly at a passing water-fowl;” and, from the near presence of the elephant’s bone, it is shown that man here, as well as in Europe, was the contemporary of the elephant, in at least a portion of the Missouri Valley.40 Implement found in Loess. Other examples are on record. In Greene County, Illinois, parties digging a well found, at the depth of seventy-two feet, a stone hatchet. Mr. McAdams carefully examined the well, to see if it could have dropped from near the surface. He tells us the well was dug through loess deposits; and from the top down was as smooth, and almost as hard, as a cemented cistern.41 The loess was, as in Nebraska, deposited in the still waters of the lake which once occupied the Valley of the Illinois.42 And we need not doubt but that it dates from the breaking up of the glacial ice. The position of this hatchet, then, found at the very bottom of the loess deposits, shows that, while yet the glaciers lingered in the north, and the flooded rivers spread out in great lakes, some tribes of stone-using folks hunted along the banks of the lakes, whose bottoms were to form the rich prairies of the West.