--- id: scenarios/grand-kankakee-marsh about: depiction: scenarios/grand-kankakee-marsh.jpg label: 'The Grand Kankakee Marsh, drained' description: >- A vast marsh on the Kankakee River in Indiana was dredged into farmland by 1918. Floods, moving sand and farm runoff followed. What would putting some of it back do? tags: - Kankakee River - wetland drainage - channelization - flooding - sediment - nitrogen - wetland restoration - historical reconstruction scenario: place: >- The Kankakee River basin in northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois, from South Bend to Momence and the river below since: '1886' scale: bioregion domains: - water - food - ecology - places - people relations: - predicate: example_of target: questions/flooding - predicate: example_of target: questions/land-use-change - predicate: needs target: data-sources/usgs-water-data - predicate: needs target: law/national-wetlands-inventory - predicate: needs target: law/fema-national-flood-hazard-layer provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: >- Water Resource Availability in the Kankakee River Basin, Indiana: Executive Summary (Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water, 1990) url: 'https://www.in.gov/dnr/water/files/kankakee_basinsums.pdf' - title: >- Kankakee River Basin Streamflow Assessment Model: Hydrologic Analysis, Contract Report 541 (H. Vernon Knapp, Illinois State Water Survey, November 1992; archived copy) url: >- https://web.archive.org/web/20200709103131/https://www.isws.illinois.edu/pubdoc/cr/iswscr-541.pdf - title: >- Environmental Setting of the Upper Illinois River Basin and Implications for Water Quality, Water-Resources Investigations Report 98-4268 (Arnold and others, USGS, 1999) url: 'https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/1998/4268/wrir98_4268.pdf' - title: >- Kankakee River Flood and Sediment Management Work Plan, August 2019 (Final) (Christopher B. Burke Engineering for the Kankakee River Basin Commission, the City of Watseka, and Iroquois and Kankakee counties) url: 'https://kankakeeandyellowrivers.org/2019-workplan.pdf' - title: >- About Us/FAQs (Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission) url: 'https://kankakeeandyellowrivers.org/about/' - title: >- Regression models for estimating sediment and nutrient concentrations and loads at the Kankakee River, Shelby, Indiana, December 2015 through May 2018, SIR 2019-5005 (Lathrop, Bunch and Downhour, USGS, 2019) url: 'https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/sir20195005' - title: >- Kankakee River at Davis, IN Mega Gage: Monitoring Groundwater/Surface-Water Interactions (USGS) url: >- https://www.usgs.gov/centers/ohio-kentucky-indiana-water-science-center/science/kankakee-river-davis-mega-gage - title: >- Site and series catalog for USGS gages 05515500 (Davis, IN), 05518000 (Shelby, IN) and 05520500 (Momence, IL) (USGS Water Services) url: >- https://waterservices.usgs.gov/nwis/site/?sites=05520500,05518000,05515500&seriesCatalogOutput=true&outputDataTypeCd=dv,pk&format=rdb - title: >- Wetlands Losses in the United States 1780s to 1980s (Thomas E. Dahl, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1990; archived copy) url: >- https://web.archive.org/web/20240105144329/https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/documents/wetlands-losses-in-the-united-states-1780s-to-1980s.pdf - title: >- Public Land Survey Digitized Map Data of Grand Kankakee Marsh, Indiana, circa 1830s (Halsey, Peters and Patterson, University of Notre Dame, on ScienceBase) url: 'https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/609031a6d34e93746a710564' - title: Kankakee Sands (The Nature Conservancy) url: >- https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/kankakee-sands/ - title: >- Fridays on the Farm: Restoring the Grand Kankakee Marsh (USDA farmers.gov, 25 November 2022) url: >- https://www.farmers.gov/blog/fridays-on-farm-restoring-grand-kankakee-marsh - title: >- Kankakee National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; archived 3 December 2025) url: >- https://web.archive.org/web/20251203172436/https://www.fws.gov/refuge/kankakee - title: >- Potawatomi Indians, historical marker 50.1949.1 (Indiana Historical Bureau) url: 'https://www.in.gov/history/markers/3914.htm' - title: 'Potawatomi Trail of Death (Kansapedia, Kansas Historical Society)' url: 'https://www.kansashistory.gov/kansapedia/potawatomi-trail-of-death/17944' - title: Grand Kankakee Marsh (Wikipedia) url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Kankakee_Marsh' - title: >- File:Grand Kankakee Marsh 1849 S. Augustus Mitchell Library of Congress.png (Wikimedia Commons) url: >- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_Kankakee_Marsh_1849_S._Augustus_Mitchell_Library_of_Congress.png - title: >- Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission (home page) url: 'https://kankakeeandyellowrivers.org/' created: '2026-10-25' reviewed: '2026-10-25' reviewed_by: >- Claude, from the sources listed; the Illinois State Water Survey report, the 1990 wetland loss report and the refuge page were read in archived copies, the refuge page and the wetland report because fws.gov refused direct requests; the count of bends rests on Wikipedia alone status: draft --- The Kankakee River rises near South Bend, Indiana, and flows west into Illinois to join the Des Plaines and form the Illinois River. Its basin covers 2,989 square miles in Indiana and 2,169 in Illinois.[^1] Most of the valley upstream of Momence, Illinois, was once the Grand Kankakee Marsh, a mosaic of grassy wetlands, hardwood swamps and sandy islands.[^2,3] Estimates of its size differ. The USGS gives about 400,000 acres, in a corridor 3 to 5 miles wide on each side of the river.[^3] The Indiana Department of Natural Resources gives 625 square miles, a 1992 Illinois State Water Survey report 500,000 acres, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service close to a million acres.[^1,2,12] The river wound through it for some 240 to 250 miles.[^2,4] Wikipedia reports nineteenth-century counts of about 2,000 bends between South Bend and Momence.[^16] Water stood 1 to 4 feet deep over the marsh for eight or nine months of the year.[^2] Just upstream of Momence a limestone ledge in the riverbed constricted the flow.[^2] In Newton County lay Beaver Lake, then the largest lake in Indiana: 7 miles long, 5 wide and no more than 10 feet deep.[^11] The ancestors of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, whose villages were in and around the South Bend area, used the marsh for fishing, gathering and hunting, a tribal representative told the Department of Agriculture.[^12] The Treaty of Tippecanoe of 1832 sold the lands of Menominee's Potawatomi community without his consent.[^15] In August 1838 some 800 Potawatomi were collected at Twin Lakes in Marshall County, Indiana. On 4 September the militia removed 859 at gunpoint and marched them more than 600 miles to Kansas. Forty-two died on the way.[^14,15] ## How it was drained Ditching of some of the tributaries began in the 1880s to make the land farmable. When that did not drain it, the dredging moved downstream.[^2] In 1893 Indiana cut the ledge at Momence down by several feet; apart from that, the river in Illinois was left as it was.[^2] The main channel in Indiana was straightened by a series of projects. The Illinois State Water Survey says they were finished in 1917; the USGS dates the work on the main stem from 1906 to 1918.[^2,3,4] The dredges cut from one meander to the next and joined the straight pieces. The river kept its course down the valley but lost its bends, and its connection to the floodplain was reduced.[^4] In Indiana it went from about 250 miles to 82, and its slope from 0.45 to 0.83 feet per mile.[^4] The tributaries became a network of ditches; by the state's 1990 count, less than 1% of the watershed's streams were in natural condition.[^2] Spoil from the dredging was cast beside the channel. It now forms berms that are discontinuous and unstable in many places, and the 2019 work plan for the river concluded it was placed for convenience, not for flood protection.[^4] Indiana as a whole lost an estimated 87% of its wetlands between the 1780s and the 1980s, from 5.6 million acres to about 750,000. Illinois lost 85%.[^9] ## What followed Citing state figures from 1976, the Illinois State Water Survey reported that floods still spilled over about 222,000 acres, some 40% of the old marsh, about three times a year.[^2] Of the cropland in the Indiana part of the watershed, 64% then had excess water problems.[^2] Severe flooding and sediment led to legal battles between Indiana and Illinois in the 1980s.[^4] Annual peak flows have trended upward at every gage in the system except Kouts, whose record is short.[^4] At Momence the trend line runs from about 5,200 cubic feet a second in 1915 to 9,200 in 2018, a rise of 77%. At Shelby, Indiana, the rise since 1923 is 39%.[^4] The work plan puts this down to heavier rain with climate change, faster runoff from development and farm drainage, and lost floodplain storage.[^4] The flood of February and March 2018 set the highest stages on record in several places.[^4] The central and lower river corridor is mostly wind-blown sand, and so are the spoil piles. As high flows grow more frequent the piles erode, and the sand moves down the river into Illinois.[^4] The Yellow River is the largest tributary in Indiana, and in big flows it brings a disproportionate share of the sand.[^4] Below Momence, near Aroma Park, islands formed in the river; a 1981 study put most of their growth down to sand deposited during and after the channelization.[^4] At Shelby the USGS estimated that the river carried 105,000 tons of suspended sediment, 8,690 tons of nitrogen and 265 tons of phosphorus in 2016. In 2017 the figures were 91,000, 8,890 and 236 tons.[^6] What drainage did to the river's flow cannot be measured directly, because most of it was finished before streamflow records began.[^2,3] From the storage the marsh provided, the Illinois State Water Survey inferred in 1992 that floods are probably higher and drought flows lower than before. Its model takes the drained river of the 1920s as the natural baseline.[^2] One stretch still shows the old river. In the Momence Wetlands upstream of Momence the Kankakee meanders with a sinuosity of 1.46. The work plan compares it with the cut-off meander scars in Indiana and treats this reach as representative of the river before straightening.[^4] It calls the reach a shock absorber that stores water and sediment for the river below.[^4] ## Who needs an answer - The Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission. The Indiana General Assembly created it in 2019, and it brings together eight Indiana counties, the Department of Natural Resources and advisers from Illinois.[^5,18] It holds a 75-foot easement from the top of each bank and may buy land from willing sellers for flood storage and levees.[^5] Its capital projects are paid for by assessments, such as $1 a farm acre and $7 a residential parcel.[^5] In September 2019 it adopted a 40-year plan.[^5] The plan's cost is put at a minimum of $134 million, needing up to $5.8 million a year against about $3 million expected from the assessments.[^4] - Farmers and drainage districts. About 1.1 million of the 1.3 million acres in the commission's counties are farmed.[^5] The work plan counts about 1.5 times as many miles of drainage per square mile in the Kankakee system as in other northern Indiana rivers.[^4] It proposes buying flood-prone land and leasing it back, or buying flood easements, so that farmers can keep farming land that is allowed to flood.[^4] - Towns in Illinois. Momence and Kankakee on the river, and Watseka on the Iroquois, have homes and roads in the floodplain.[^4] - The holders of restored land. Indiana turned the area where the Yellow River meets the Kankakee back to marsh in 1933.[^5] The Kankakee Fish and Wildlife Area there has internal berms the work plan would breach so the two rivers can share their floodwater.[^4] The Nature Conservancy bought 7,200 acres of farmland in Newton County in 1996, on land once part of the marsh and Beaver Lake. It now manages the 8,400-acre Efroymson Prairie at Kankakee Sands.[^11] Since 2002 the Pokagon Band has restored 1,147 acres of the marsh to wetland with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.[^12] The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Kankakee National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area, established in 2016, is 66 acres of oak savanna.[^13] In 1998 the Service was proposing a 30,000-acre refuge in the basin.[^3] ## The domains it chains Rain falls on sandy outwash that feeds the river through the ground: base flow is more than 80% of the Kankakee's runoff.[^1] The denser the ditches and tile, the faster runoff reaches the river.[^4] The straight channel carries floods and sand to the Illinois line, where the river still winds through wetland.[^4] How much of the river's nitrate arrives through the groundwater is a question the USGS has set out to answer at Davis, with four wells beside the gage.[^7] Where the marsh held water, the floodplain is now farmed and built on.[^4] ## What a twin should let people try - Put the marsh back: lay the land cover recorded by the 1830s surveys over today's terrain, run the floods of record through it, and compare the peaks at Shelby and Momence with what the gages measured. That would test the 1992 inference about floods and low flows before drainage.[^2] - Restore a share: return a tenth, a quarter or half of the old marsh to wetland, choosing the parcels, and see what changes downstream in flood peaks, sand reaching Illinois and nitrogen passing Shelby. - Move the levees back. In the work plan's own hydraulic model, removing every berm along the main stem cut flows by about 15% and lowered flood levels in some areas by 1.5 feet.[^4] Its smaller set of breaches and setback berms gave 9% and 0.9 feet.[^4] The first run left the berms on tributaries and field ditches in place.[^4] A twin should reproduce those runs, then open the tributaries too. The idea is old here: in 1990 the state reported a proposal for setback levees along 60 miles of the river, whose future was then uncertain.[^1] - Drainage: how high the water table would rise under nearby fields if an outlet ditch were left to fill in or a berm were breached, and how many acres could still be cropped. - Future rain: the work plan cites a Notre Dame study finding that today's 1% annual chance flood will likely come twice as often.[^4] Run each option under that. ## Where to start A team led by Samniqueka Halsey digitized the Public Land Survey notes for the marsh, made about the 1830s, in a dataset published by the University of Notre Dame on ScienceBase.[^10] The data holds a pre-settlement land cover layer for the basin's counties in Indiana and Illinois and a layer of streams, drains, rapids and springs.[^10] It also marks trails, homesteads, mills, roads, Indian settlements and mounds that the surveyors noted.[^10] The USGS gage at Momence has daily discharge from 1905 and annual peaks from 1915; Shelby's daily record starts in 1923 and Davis's in 1925.[^8] Davis and Shelby measure nitrate continuously.[^6,7] All are in [USGS Water Data](/data-sources/usgs-water-data/). The Shelby regression models estimate daily sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus loads from the continuous sensors.[^6] For the 2019 work plan the engineers built a new two-dimensional hydraulic model of the river.[^4] Today's wetlands are in the [National Wetlands Inventory](/law/national-wetlands-inventory/), and FEMA's flood zones in the [National Flood Hazard Layer](/law/fema-national-flood-hazard-layer/). The general question is under [flooding](/questions/flooding/). The picture is a detail of Samuel Augustus Mitchell's 1849 map of Indiana, from the Library of Congress and in the public domain. The marsh is drawn along the Kankakee and Yellow rivers, with Beaver Lake to the south.[^17]