Researcher suggests a revision to the Ionia Volcano story
The story of the Ionia Volcano on the northwestern edge of Dixon County is familiar to many readers.
The Laurel Advocate of July 12, 1939, published a story about the so-called volcano which contained information I had not previously seen.
The so-called Ionia “volcano” was an unusual geologic formation known to early French traders as “Burnt Bluff.”
The area was known to the Indians for centuries and is said to have been considered a sacred place by the Poncas who inhabited the area when White settlers began arriving in 1856.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition reached the site Aug. 22, 1804, but did not mention it in their journals until Aug. 24.
In his entry for that day William Clark described it as a blue clay bluff of 180 or 190 feet high and that “appear to have been latterly on fire and at this time is too hot for a man to bear his hand in the earth at any depth.”
In 1856 a group of town site speculators from Sioux City, surveyed and staked out a town they called “Ionia” on the bottom land near the base of the bluff. L.T. Hill purchased the bare town site in 1858.
Under his leadership, the town began growing until it reached a population of about 300 in 1872. The early settlers noted that steam or smoke having a sulfurous smell often rose from the bluff and that stone dug out of the ground was too hot to handle. Burnt Bluff became known as the Ionia Volcano.
In 1874 the river changed channels and began threatening the Ionia town site.
On the morning of Nov. 15, 1877, Nebraska experienced a strong earthquake. The shock was felt as far as Chicago. Buildings were damaged in Columbus and Sioux City. In Dixon County the ground shook, windows rattled. Other than a few broken windows, no major damage was reported. But on Volcano Hill steam and fumes arose from the ground and the ground around the fissures became so hot that it cracked. Ionia’s residents feared that an eruption was imminent.
Probably due to press coverage, interest in the Nebraska volcano increased after that. Eastern scientists came to Dixon County in December 1877. Their opinion was that Ionia had a real volcano. Some of them believed that there was a reservoir of fire somewhere beneath the surface. Should the Missouri River break into this fiery pit, a terrific explosion might result which could destroy the whole area.
Nothing like that happened but a flood in the spring of 1878 severely cut into the town site which was on the bottom ground below the bluffs and much of Volcano Hill collapsed into the river. A worse flood in the spring of 1881 destroyed what was left.
The smoking stopped for some time but new activity began a few years later. The Advocate on July 29, 1893, reported that a party of hunters had discovered a fissure in what was left of the bluff. Scorching hot air was coming out of it and the ground around it was extremely hot.
Around 1900 a reporter from what was described as a “well known newspaper” built a fire on the bluff and photographed the smoke and flames. The picture was used to show the volcano had once again become active. Fake news seems to be nothing new.
By this time, however, few local people believed that the steam and heat were produced by a volcanic action. In 1839 the French geographer Jean N. Nicollet proposed that the heat actually was produced by the decomposition of iron pyrites in the damp shale. But Nicollet’s work was not widely known and the early settlers continued to believe there was an active volcano lurking beneath the surface.
Around 1900 Erwin H. Barbour and George E. Condra, both professors at the University of Nebraska, verified Nicollet’s theory that the heat was produced by a chemical reaction. Condra mentions this on page 79 of his book “Geography of Nebraska” which was first published in 1906 and used in the public schools for decades. On page five of the same book, Condra noted that the Missouri River channel near Ionia had shifted about a quarter of a mile during the last 50 years. It may have shifted even more before that.
In a 2011 article published in “We Proceeded On,” a journal of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, John W. Jengo, a professional geologist and Lewis and Clark scholar, proposed that the burning bluffs mentioned in Clark’s journal may not have been at the base of the Ionia Volcano but rather several miles upriver.
After studying a reconstructed map of the Missouri River channel in 1804 and visiting many of the sites mentioned in the Expedition’s journals, Jengo decided that the “burning bluffs” may have been located west of the present Newcastle-Vermillion bridge about halfway between the mouth of Ames Creek and a former mouth of Lime Creek.
This would place it northwest of Maskell close to the Cedar/Dixon county line instead of northeast of Newcastle
After visiting both sites, Jengo observed that the same formation of Carlile shale that contained the heat-producing minerals at Ionia also was exposed at the proposed location and that the Missouri River in 1804 flowed at the base of that bluff while it was about a mile back from the Ionia bluff. Jengo also noted that Clark did not mention the hot bluffs until Aug. 24, 1804, the day they passed the westerly site.
Lewis and Clark observed several burning bluffs on their voyage upriver in 1804. Most are now submerged beneath the upstream reservoirs. There is one site in South Dakota that still produces heat, smoke and steam on occasion. It is located near the west end of the Platte-Winner bridge on Highway 44 in Gregory County.
The rock formation at that location is the same as in Dixon County, an exposed layer of Carlile shale containing iron sulfide that reacts with oxygen and water to produce heat. Geologists have determined temperatures can reach 3,000 degrees deep in the rock and more than 700 degrees near the surface.
Sounds like a stop on my next motorcycle trip to Sturgis — if we are freed from Covid-imprisonment and things start returning to normal by August.
POSTSCRIPT TO MY LAST SPANISH FLU ARTICLE: Shirley Grella Haase of Omaha sent me an email stating that Hertha Rath Munter of Belden gave birth to twin girls, Lorena and Loretta, on Dec. 7, 1918. Hertha and both babies died of the Spanish Flu on Dec. 21, 1918. Hertha was Shirley’s great aunt. If readers have other corrections or additions, please send them to me at EdwrdTryn@aol.com.
Robert Dump
Northeast Neb. News Company