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AUDIT ROW #431 · CAMPBELL AND HOWARD FOR NAVIGATION · THE VERDICT AT ITS STRENGTH
Tested as a working river — rafts, flatboats, any commercial navigation on the reach that touches this ground — the Kankakee above the marsh country returns a drainage record, not a navigation one. Campbell and Howard were read for the limb (the same two authorities who disagree about the rise agree about the use): the upper river's historical freight was the marsh itself — its hay, its furs, its drained land after the dredges — and the river's commercial navigation belongs to its Illinois lower course and to the canal era's ambitions, not to the Indiana headwaters beside this township. What floated past Walkerton's horizon was water, going to Illinois, slower every decade as the ditches straightened it. Printed as a test result at the two histories' strength, with the federal river-and-harbor survey record named as the settler for the formal navigation finding.
Principal sources: Campbell and Howard, as carried in the banked set (the working record); settler named — U.S. Army Corps river-and-harbor surveys of the Kankakee.