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THE GRAND KANKAKEE MARSH AT ITS EASTERN HEAD
West and north of the townsite, the outwash plain lay under water. The Grand Kankakee Marsh filled the Kankakee valley from western St. Joseph County into Illinois, and the estimates of its size differ by the measure each authority takes: the United States Geological Survey gives about 400,000 acres in a corridor three to five miles wide on each side of the river; the Indiana Department of Natural Resources gives 625 square miles; a 1992 Illinois State Water Survey report gives 500,000 acres; the Natural Resources Conservation Service, counting the marginal wet prairie with the marsh proper, gives close to a million acres. The river wound some 240 to 250 meandering miles through it. Water stood one to four feet deep over the marsh for eight or nine months of the year. The valley's geomorphology, as the Kankakee marsh study in the land-utilization literature states it, is an intermorainal reclaimed valley: the Valparaiso moraine on the north, the Maxinkuckee moraine on the east and southeast, and the valley fill classed by Chamberlin and Leverett as mostly outwash — meltwater sediment ponded behind the limestone ledge at Momence, the remnant basin of the glacial Lake Kankakee of about 14,000 years ago, whose level the ledge held and whose floor the marsh inherited. Chapman's physical chapter gives the marsh's substance at first hand: along the Kankakee lies a peat bed upward of sixty miles long, about three miles wide, and ten to fifteen feet deep, "one of the most extensive peat-beds in the State." Lincoln Township's own share of the system is Chapman's sentence in the township chapter — "a considerable portion of the land of Lincoln township is marshy and wet" — and the 1882 survey the state commissioned to drain the valley, Professor John L. Campbell's, reprinted entire in Howard (pp. 245–252), measures the plain this ground stands on: a sluiceway from one to twenty miles wide, of sand and gravel in its ridges and water-covered in its bottoms, falling about a foot to the mile. Campbell's stations touch this section's ground directly: his station C stands 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."