User:IveGoneAway/sandbox/Kaw Lake (proglacial lake)

Kaw Lake refers to a proglacial lake that formed during the Pleistocene when glaciers dammed the Kansas River, the river itself nicknamed "The Kaw". A number of landforms record the influence of the lake, the glacier, and the glacier's outflow;
 * rolling low hills of loess-like red clay, outwash gravels, and polished red boulders of Sioux Quartzite north of the Kansas River in Pottawatomie and Shawnee counties,
 * Sioux Quartzite moraines on top of the Permian limestone ridges south of the river and in the basin of Shunganunga Creek south of Topeka,
 * river systems just south those ridges that parallel the Kaw that for a time carried the displaced flow of the whole of the Missouri River watershed; particularly Mission Creek, Shunganunga Creek, and the historic Wakarusa River),
 * and red loess lake terraces in and around Junction City, Ogden, and Manhattan.

Exploration
Approaching the Kansas River crossing at Cross Creek from the northeast, the 1724 Bourgmont Expedition to the Padouca described "reddish, marbled" boulders protruding above the short buffalo grass, making the first recorded description of the glaciated terrain along that segment of the Kansas River.

Within the remainder of the 18th century, the Kansa people relocated from their previous main settlement on the Missouri river to the middle and upper Kansa River. With the center of the population in the vicinity of Buffalo Mound, a sacred landmark in the midst of the migrant Sioux Quartzite boulder field, the community developed a spiritual connection to the stones that modern science would classify as glacial erratics.