About
La Moine River, Illinois — 1856 Survey, 1840s-1880s Logging, 1990s-2010s La Moine Trail 100-mi Macomb. Flow defines the La Moine's character before anything else. USGS gauge 05569500 records a mean discharge of about 783 CFS, and the river runs best between 400 and 1,150 CFS. It carries a Class I rating, the gentlest on the whitewater scale — this is moving flatwater through farm country, not a technical run. That temperament fits a river that drains some 1,300 square miles of western Illinois and flows south through seven counties before reaching the Illinois River.
Long before survey stakes marked its banks, the La Moine flowed through the ancestral territory of the Potawatomi, the Kickapoo, the Peoria of the Illinois Confederation, the Miami, the Sauk, the Meskwaki (Fox), and the Winnebago, or Ho-Chunk. The river served as a travel corridor, a fishing ground, and a gathering place. The cession framework that displaced these peoples ran through the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis, the 1816 Treaty of Fort Harrison, the treaties of 1818 through 1832, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the 1832 Black Hawk War. Today the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the Kickapoo Tribe, the Peoria Tribe, and the Ho-Chunk Nation maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights.
Settlement came fast once it arrived. Charles Hills and David Fees put down the first homestead in Lamoine township in the spring of 1830, on section 12. A quarter-century later, in 1856, crews surveyed the river itself and fixed its course on the maps that would guide the farms, mills, and towns rising across the watershed. That 1856 survey remains the river's defining documentary chapter.
The hardwood era followed. From the 1830s into the 1920s, the La Moine corridor was logged to feed the 1850–1910 Illinois hardwood industry — oak, hickory, walnut, maple, elm, and ash. The timber supplied the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy and Illinois Central railway expansion, and the Chicago lumber trade. The 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the 1930s establishment of state parks together ended large-scale cutting. Hydrology got its first serious study alongside the timber: the USGS Illinois Survey worked the region from the 1870s into the 1890s, gauging stations went in from the 1880s through the 1910s, and Illinois Geological Survey streamflow work followed into the 1930s.
The modern chapter is one of recovery. Since 2010, the Illinois EPA — working with the La Moine Watershed Partnership and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation — has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Streambank stabilization ran from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking that included smallmouth bass and sauger from 2017 to 2024, and Asian carp monitoring and barrier projects from 2020 to 2024. The Illinois EPA's Total Maximum Daily Load program and the state's Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program continue that work.
Today the La Moine carries a State designation and is recognized as an Illinois Fishing River. Its corridor supports the economies of Macomb, Carthage, and Colchester, and the valley is home to the La Moine River State Trail and the Macomb Historic District. From the cabins on section 12 to the restocked smallmouth and sauger, the river threads a continuity of place through the Illinois countryside that reaches back nearly two hundred years.
River conditions are community-verified. CFS ranges, difficulty ratings, and access points may not reflect every flow level or seasonal change. Always check current conditions, scout unfamiliar rapids, and paddle within your skill level.