The Grand Kankakee Marsh and the market gun

The 1870s to the drainage, 1882–1918

The marsh: The western edge of this county was the eastern edge of a sea of grass and water. The naturalist Alfred Meyer's 1936 account of the Grand Kankakee Marsh fixes its reach in one sentence: the marsh "stretched across northwestern Indiana from western St. Joseph County into Illinois" — more than 500,000 acres of marsh three to four feet deep, "the Everglades of the North," a prairie wetland of wild rice and smartweed threaded by the slow Kankakee. What that water held, the market record states in prices: in the 1870s, a dozen fine mallards brought $1.00 to $1.75 in the Chicago market, and the song of the shotgun, in Meyer's phrase, "was heard everywhere." The marsh's hunters worked from push boats of about fourteen feet, poled rather than rowed through the shallows; the birds went out by the barrel to city restaurants and game dealers, season after season, under no effective limit.

The sportsmen and the clubs: Behind the market hunters came the city sportsmen. By the early 1880s, on Meyer's account, Fox Lake and the Calumet marshes had been "crowded out and shot out," and Chicago's duck hunters turned to the Kankakee; the hunting clubs that followed — the Diana and the Cumberland among the marsh's named clubs, with their clubhouses and their live-bird medal contests — were formed in part, the record says, to restrict the shooting that open access had made ruinous. The survey biology of the marsh was written while the shooting was still on: Maurice Thompson's 1888 list of the water and shore birds of the Kankakee region, published in the state geologist's report from his own field notes, records red-winged blackbirds swarming over the marsh, mallards in large flocks in spring and autumn, Canada geese settling to rest for a week or ten days, wood ducks very plentiful, and the field plover "much sought after for the market by pot-hunters." Amos Butler's 1897 catalogue of Indiana birds gathers the marsh's observers together — Ruthven Deane's count of some seventy-five wood ducks in a day at English Lake on 29 July 1889 among them; English Lake lies in Starke County, down the river, and is printed here as the marsh's record rather than this county's.

The drainage that ended the marsh — the ditching and dredging of 1882 to 1918 that straightened the Kankakee and emptied its wetlands into farmland — is told in the land file of this record; its faunal consequence is the subject of the entry that follows. One bird of the marsh survived the drainage as a breeder a little longer than the rest: the sandhill crane, locally abundant as a nesting bird in northwestern Indiana until 1929 on the regional record, outlasted the marsh itself by a decade.

Sources:

1. Alfred H. Meyer, "The Grand Marsh, Kankakee River, Indiana" (1936), as reproduced at waterfowling.net — the marsh's reach from western St. Joseph County; the 1870s Chicago prices; the push boats; the clubs and the turn from Fox Lake and the Calumet.
2. Maurice Thompson, list of the water and shore birds of the Kankakee region, Indiana state geologist's report (1888), from his field notes; Amos W. Butler, Birds of Indiana catalogue (1897), marsh notes incl. Deane at English Lake, 29 July 1889 — both as gathered in the scholarly digest of the marsh's bird record (digitaltwins.wiki, "The Grand Kankakee Marsh, its water and its birds," citing the primary sources).
3. The drainage frame, 1882–1918: the land and before-the-city file of this record.