The Wounded Knee plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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Wounded Knee’s center stands about 3,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,150 ft to 3,540 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Porcupine Butte, about 3,640 ft, 3 miles northeast.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 21×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, volcanic. Age: Late Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Wounded Knee reaches the Gulf of America by way of Wounded Knee Creek, the White River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,510 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wounded Knee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
