Wildcat Creek

About

Wildcat Creek, Indiana — Kokomo, Treaty of 1826, Wabash Tributary. Before any of that, Wildcat Creek belonged to the Miami people, whose territory covered the forested hills the water still threads. The creek's English name likely references the bobcats that inhabited those hills. The valley also brushed against a pivotal moment in Indiana's founding conflict: the Battle of Wildcat Creek was fought nearby in 1811, during the same campaign as the Battle of Tippecanoe.

The 1826 Treaty at the Mississinewa reshaped the watershed. In it, the Miami conveyed the land on which Howard County and Kokomo were later founded, ground that sat north of the Wabash River. Kokomo was platted in 1844 and took its name from the Miami chief Kokomoko. His Howard County land reserve was one of seven individual reserves preserved under the 1840 treaty — a small legal fingerprint of Miami presence pressed into the county's earliest survey lines.

The forests came down next. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Wildcat Creek watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry of the 1850s–1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s–1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The old-growth stands were largely exhausted by 1910; state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging for good.

As the timber played out, Kokomo turned to machines. From the 1880s into the 1940s, the creek's valley powered an industrial boom anchored by the city's automotive works — Elwood Haynes's automobile shops and the Haynes-Apperson Company among them. Natural gas fueled the growth; Kokomo was at one time the world's largest natural gas field. That prosperity came at a cost. The creek suffered major industrial pollution through the mid-20th century, the legacy of more than a century of logging, agriculture, and manufacturing along its banks. The first hard look at the water had come earlier — USGS survey work in the 1870s–1890s, gauging stations established in the 1880s–1910s, and state geological streamflow assessments in the 1910s–1930s — and later state water-pollution studies of the 1950s–1970s and Clean Water Act assessments after 1972 set the stage for recovery.

Restoration efforts since the 1990s have brought the creek back. Smallmouth bass and paddlefish have returned to water that was once badly fouled. In 2018, local communities developed the Wildcat Creek Greenway to promote paddling access and riparian conservation, adding new put-ins and improving water quality. Today the creek is an Indiana Natural & Scenic River candidate, and paddlers run it in three broad stretches: Kokomo to Burlington (25 miles, a tighter, rockier upper creek), Burlington to Owasco (20 miles, the best rapids section), and Owasco to the Wabash confluence (15 miles, a wider approach toward Lafayette). Wildcat Creek Outfitters rents canoes and kayaks near Lafayette. What runs through north-central Indiana now is a working river carrying a layered inheritance — treaty ground, frontier town, and automaking ambition — through the landscape it helped settle.