The Marsh System, and What Drainage Did to Its Animals

The Grand Kankakee Marsh at boundary size; Terre Coupee's wet prairie at township size

Lead: Frame first, because the marsh invites exaggeration: the Grand Kankakee Marsh proper — 400,000 to 600,000 acres of marsh, swamp, wet prairie and oak opening along the Kankakee River across northwest Indiana, the “Everglades of the North” — lay west and southwest of this township, on La Porte County and downriver ground. St. Joseph County's share, and Olive Township's share inside it, is the headwater edge: the Kankakee rises about a mile west of South Bend, in Chapman's survey, and runs through the county's southwest sections into La Porte County; Terre Coupee itself “was at one time covered by water,” a large shallow lake in the 1878 account Chapman reprints, draining out Grapevine Creek to the Kankakee. This ground fed the marsh system; it was not the marsh's famous heart, and its animal story is told at that size.

The marsh's animal economy was industrial before it was drained. From the 1870s, rail-borne market hunters and sportsmen's clubs — the Louisville Gun Club built the first clubhouse in 1878 — worked the marsh for waterfowl shipped to city markets; fur and game sales bought more than one settler's land, in the Porter County Museum's account. Maurice Thompson's 1888 list of the Kankakee region's water and shore birds, printed in the state geologist's report, and Amos Butler's 1897 Birds of Indiana catalogue are the period baselines for the marsh proper; for this county, Chapman's 1880 list is the baseline, and his duck family “visited the ponds and streams of this county in large numbers before it became so thickly settled… but now mostly confine themselves to the wilder places,” with waders already thinned because “cultivation has drained their favorite haunts.” Sandhill cranes, Chapman notes, still stopped on migration; on the marsh proper they remained locally abundant breeders until 1929, in the marsh literature — a downriver fact, printed as one.

Drainage came in two scales. On the marsh: tributary ditching from the 1880s, the Momence ledge cut in 1893, and main-stem channelization finished in 1917–1918 (the dates vary by source between the Illinois State Water Survey and USGS accounts), which straightened the river, severed its meanders, and left less than five percent of the marsh — with the loss, in the marsh literature's accounting, of a fifth of the migratory bird population of the United States. On this township: The Land carries Terre Coupee's own drainage course, and Chapman already records its beginning — along the Kankakee in this county “the marshes are becoming gradually dried each year,” over a peat bed sixty miles long. The animal consequence that can be printed for this ground is the one Chapman himself draws the line under: the swimmers “have almost disappeared,” the whooping crane “now never seen,” the marsh birds retreating to “the wilder places.” The two surviving wetlands of the township — Spicer Lake and the Bendix Woods low ground, both protected a century later — are what drainage left, and they carry the closing article of this section.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), pp. 336–337 (Terre Coupee as shallow lake; Kankakee rise and course; marshes drying, peat bed) and pp. 342–343 (swimmers, waders, duck family).
2. Grand Kankakee Marsh literature — 400,000–600,000 acres; channelization 1882–1917/18; less than 5% surviving (Wikipedia synthesis of the marsh record; DredgeWire/Kankakee River Basin Commission account, 2019).
3. Porter County Museum (Murl M. Nichols, 1976) — hunting, trapping and guiding economy on the Grand Marsh; drainage chronology.
4. “The Grand Kankakee Marsh, its water and its birds” (marsh bird record synthesis) — Thompson 1888 water-bird list; Butler 1897; market gunning and club houses; sandhill cranes breeding locally until 1929.
5. Companion file The Land (this build) — Terre Coupee drainage course, carried there and joined here, not re-derived.