Kankakee River

About

Grand Kankakee Marsh — America's Lost Everglades. The Kankakee begins near 41°39′N, 86°18′W in Portage Township, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, and threads west through Starke, LaPorte, Porter, and Lake counties over its 133-mile course. USGS streamgage 05520500 records a mean discharge of about 2,155 cubic feet per second, with a paddling window that opens best between roughly 1,100 and 3,250 cfs. It is a Class I river — moving water without significant whitewater — which suits its history as a marsh drain and its present life as a designated water trail.

Before the dredges, this was the Grand Kankakee Marsh, a sprawling wetland covering 500,000 to 600,000 acres of northern Indiana and northeastern Illinois. Ecologists have compared its size and richness to the Florida Everglades. The river's slow, looping waters supported dense populations of fish and waterfowl, and the surrounding country was ancestral territory for the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Delaware (Lenape), the Shawnee, the Kickapoo, and the Wyandot. For these peoples the Kankakee served as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. A cascade of treaties — the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, the 1804 Treaty of Grouseland, the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, and the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's — built the cession framework that the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the 1840 removal treaties would complete.

The river also fed an industry. From the 1830s through the 1920s, its watershed was logged to supply Indiana's hardwood trade — oak, hickory, walnut, poplar, and maple — feeding sawmills, canal and railroad shipping, and the furniture and cooperage shops that turned Indiana timber into finished goods. Large-scale logging wound down after the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910 and state forestry conservation took hold.

The marsh itself did not survive the era. Drainage projects that began in the 1880s and accelerated after 1910 destroyed roughly 95 percent of the wetland. The Kankakee was dredged in 1917 to deepen and straighten it, part of the same effort that traded the marsh's slow channels for cropland across the Indiana corn belt. What had been one of North America's great wetlands became an agricultural drain in a matter of decades.

Science followed the water. The USGS Indiana Survey ran its first hydrological assessments in the 1870s through the 1890s, and USGS gauging stations were established along the Kankakee in the 1880s through the 1910s. In the modern era, recovery has become the theme. Since 2010, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management — working with Kankakee Watershed partnerships and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts. Streambank stabilization projects ran from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking (including smallmouth bass and saugeye) from 2017 to 2024, and Indiana DNR Lake and River Enhancement Program work from 2020 to 2024. The river now carries the Kankakee River National Water Trail designation, a paddling corridor that traces the ghost of the marsh it once fed.