The river: the Kankakee and its marsh

THE CHANNEL, MUD LAKE, AND THE CREEKS OF THIS REACH

The river that bounds this ground is the largest marsh river in the state, and its making is the county's largest glacial fact: the Kankakee runs in the outwash sluiceway itself — the channel the ice-margin torrent cut, a river of almost no fall wandering a plain too flat to drain it — and its capture-history and the great marsh it sustained are carried whole in the county treatment in the South Bend and Granger legs, where the river's source and the portage give them scale. This ground's reach of the river is dug here from the survey the state commissioned to drain it: Professor John L. Campbell's Kankakee survey, authorized by the state's act of 11 April 1881 and reprinted entire in Howard (pp. 245–252). Campbell fixes the river's county course: it rises in section 16, township 37 north, range 2 east, near South Bend, runs through the county to section 14, township 36 north, range 1 east, and thereafter forms the boundary between La Porte and St. Joseph counties — the line of this township's west and south rims. His survey stations measure this section's own ground: station B stands on the north line of the southwest quarter of section 23, township 36 north, range 1 west, on the river; station C at the west line of the southwest quarter of section 4, township 35 north, range 1 west, at the bridge of the Indianapolis, Peru & Chicago railway, "through the west part of Mud Lake" — the marsh lake that lay in the township's northwest, on the river's bank, until the drainage era took it. The south-side tributaries of this reach are Potato Creek and Pine Creek — Pine Creek drains the townsite's own countryside northward to the river — with the Yellow River and Bogus Creek below (Campbell, in Howard, pp. 245–252). Of the river itself Campbell prints the figures that define the marsh: some 2,000 bends between the source and Momence, by Father Stephan's count; about 240 miles of channel where the straightened course would run about 85; a drainage of more than 1,600 square miles of Indiana. The valley's lands had been granted to the state as swamp lands under the federal Swamp Land Act of 28 September 1850, and Campbell's survey was the state's instrument for making them farms: his first improvement division ran from the mouth of Grapevine Creek to the lower end of Mud Lake, past the "Free Bridge" in section 26, township 36 north, range 1 west, to the railroad bridge at Mud Lake's terminus. The dredging and straightening followed, and Howard's Lincoln Township sentence is its epitaph, quoted in the Story of Walkerton section: the rich bottoms "formerly water covered have been changed into meadows and corn fields." The marsh as it stood before the dredges — the sportsman's paradise of the next article — is the ground this section must keep in view: a wet prairie sea, miles wide, between the townsite and the river that bounded its township.