The drainage era: how the marsh was unmade, 1882–1922

DITCHES, STEAM DREDGES, AND A RIVER MADE STRAIGHT

The marsh was destroyed deliberately, by law, assessment, and steam. In 1882 the Indiana General Assembly directed John Campbell to survey the entire length of the Kankakee valley, from the river's source near South Bend to Momence, to "ascertain the cheapest and most practical outlets for the drainage of the wet and swamplands of the Kankakee region"; his report proposed dredging and straightening the river with lateral ditches through the marsh, at an estimated cost of 650,000 dollars against a projected ten-million-dollar rise in the valley's valuation. The work began where it always begins, on the tributaries, in the 1880s — Chapman's 1880 baseline already shows the piecemeal stage, the township's marsh "fast being reclaimed by draining" — and when ditching the tributaries did not drain the marsh, the dredging moved to the main stem. The state authorized private companies to do the dredging — the Miller Ditch Company among the enterprises that worked the valley — assessing the cost against the landowners by the benefit the project would bring them, which is how a public river became, in the phrase the valley's historians use, a series of ditches built at private charge for public drainage. Indiana cut the ledge at Momence down by several feet in 1893. The main channel in Indiana was then straightened in a series of projects whose dating the record does not state with one voice: the state-involvement account runs the river's transformation from 1899 to 1917, at a total ditching cost of 1,187,536.41 dollars, assessed on the benefited land from fifty cents an acre at the marsh's edges to twenty dollars an acre for the lowest marshland; the Geological Survey dates the main-stem work 1906 to 1918; and other accounts report the dredging did not reach the Indiana–Illinois state line until the fall of 1922, when Illinois complaints stopped it. The three datings print together, unreconciled. What is not in dispute is the result: the Indiana river went from about 250 meandering miles to about 82, its slope from 0.45 to 0.83 feet to the mile, and the old meanders were left as disconnected oxbow ponds or dry ground. By 1911 steam dredging had converted the landscape into a grid of ditches and land values had surged from two dollars an acre as wetland to forty or seventy-five as cornfield; by 1937 ninety-four percent of the original marsh was cultivated. The boulders at Momence were finally removed in 1927, turning the upper river into a high-velocity sluice whose sand load and flood pulses the lower valley has managed ever since — the modern chapter of the same story, in which the General Assembly in 2019 created the Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission for the eight Indiana counties of the basin, holding a seventy-five-foot easement from the top of each bank, and the commission adopted a forty-year plan in September 2019.