Lessons from a Garbled Stream

In Colorado, where I grew up, rivers cascaded down the continental divide and pushed across the high plains.Rafters shot rapids while beer drinkers sipped from cans that promised a brew derived from pure Rocky Mountain streams.Rivers were thrilling, marketable, and intoxicating.But it has been a long time since the Kankakee River quickened anyone's pulse.Sandwiched between Indiana and Illinois at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the river looks like the shriveled corpse of a sunbaked worm on the hydrological map of the United States.A tributary of the Mississippi River, the Kankakee boasts neither a delta nor a port.The Indiana section of the river was straightened in the early twentieth century.Locals unlovingly call it "the big ditch."By almost any measure, the Kankakee does not amount to much, which is why we should pay attention to it.A forgotten river, the Kankakee conceals the history of a region and its environmental transformation.It is a case study in the hidden costs of control and domination.More famous rivers have endured their share of manhandling, but the levees on the Mississippi or the dams on the Colorado grabbed as much attention as the liquids they pinned.In the heyday of Midwestern drainage between 1890 and 1920, the waters of the Kankakee spurred debates over economic progress and ecological preservation.Ardors cooled, however, as recollections of the old river faded.The Kankakee offers a lesson in the tangled phenomena of wetland destruction and memory loss.It shows what happens when aggressive improvement robs a river of its stories.The waters of the Kankakee River used to gather west of South Bend, Indiana, and weave through the loose sediment left by Pleistocene glaciers.With an average drop of five inches per mile, the river luxuriated in an eighty-five-mile-wide valley, carving switchbacks, kicking up sand islands, closing oxbows, and pooling in sloughs, ponds, wet prairies, bayous, bogs, swamps, and marshes.By the time it joined the Des Plaines River near Joliet, Illinois, the Kankakee had traveled 250 miles to reach a destination ninety-five miles away.In 1873, Father Joseph A. Stephan, a Catholic priest moonlighting as the chief engineer for the Kankakee Valley Drainage Company, counted 2,000 bends in the upper section of the river between South Bend and the falls above the town of Momence at the Illinois state line. 1 All rivers ramble, but the Kankakee stood out for its "extremely flat character" and "extreme crookedness." 2 It was radically lazy water.The river used to spill everywhere, generating 768,000 acres of permanent and semi-permanent wetlands brimming with pike, pickerel, ducks, wild rice, bullrushes, raccoons, sycamores, marsh