Lew Wallace
Grand Kankakee Marsh
Porter County, Indiana
By Matthew A. Werner
Indiana once had one of the greatest natural habitats in North America: the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Author Lew Wallace loved it so much, he kept a houseboat on its thruway, the Kankakee River. It was his respite. Then, in the name of progress, men obliterated the marsh and ruined the river.
Of the Kankakee, Wallace wrote, “Never in all my world travels have I seen a more perfect spot, nor a more tantalizing river.” He grew up near the Wabash River. During the Mexican War, Wallace swam the Rio Grande. As a Civil War general, he met the Mississippi. While U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, he saw the Rhine, Danube, and Nile. As New Mexico Territory Governor, he crossed the Pecos and Sante Fe. The man had seen some rivers.
The Kankakee River meandered 250 miles through 2,000 oxbows from South Bend, Indiana, to Momence, Illinois. North and south of this stretch lay one million acres of marsh land — half of which flooded permanently and half with the changing seasons. Sand dunes that served as islands interspersed the flat, peaty marsh. The landscape included tall grass, cattails, oak trees, and giant sycamores. Wild apple trees, walnut trees, wild rice, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries grew in abundance.
The wildlife habitat had few peers — beaver, mink, otters, opossums, cougars, wolves, bison, elk, and fox lived there. Folklore claimed you could walk across the marsh hopping from muskrat den to muskrat den. The bottom was full of mussels. Lunker bass, walleye, and pike thrived. Bees stuffed hollow trees with honey; bats made homes in others. It was a bird paradise — purple martens, Carolina parakeets, loons, trumpeter swans, egrets, and whooping cranes nested in the marsh. Bird populations were so great that visitors described flocks that darkened the sky.
Local Potawatomi people lived with the marsh, using its abundance of mammals, birds, fish, and plants to provide food and medicine. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was a natural food pantry.
The United States government forced out the Potawatomi in the 1830s. As a result of the Swamp Land Act of 1850, Indiana carved the marsh into squares and sold it to speculators and settlers. It was said that the marsh was “the only place you could buy land by the gallon.” Many men sought to conquer the marsh and drain its water. Others, like Lew Wallace, enjoyed the marsh’s magnificence.
By the time Wallace arrived in the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1858, it was a hunter, trapper, and sportsman’s destination. Gun and hunt clubs that catered to wealthy men flourished on the sand islands and banks of the Kankakee River.
Wallace returned again and again over 43 years. He bought a lumber barge and converted it to a houseboat aptly named The Thing. It moored 100 yards south of Collier Lodge at Baum’s Bridge. With his friend, Ira Brainard, Wallace modified the vessel and created fixtures from neighbors’ unwanted furniture. The floating cabin was 10 feet by 37 feet in dimension. It had three sections (sleeping quarter, kitchen, and living room) and was topped with a framework of iron pipe and canvas. Early Porter County historian Hubert Skinner said, “There have been many boats on the Kankakee, but none ever attracted more attention than the queer barge he devised.” From the living room, Wallace likely wrote parts of Ben-Hur, The Prince of India, and his autobiography.
During his visits, Wallace fished, tinkered with his boat, and visited with the people of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He stopped at various lodges and hunting clubs along the river. “River rats, trappers, guides, pushers, and just ordinary home folks accepted him for his friendliness and his interest in the Kankakee,” wrote Skinner.
For a brief period of time during the Civil War, General Wallace was shelved. With no soldiers to lead, he retreated to the Kankakee to fish, think, and write before he was called back to battle and served through the end of the war.
Viewed as a land of financial opportunity, profiteers plundered the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Railroad box cars carted away the marsh’s splendors. Businessmen killed swans for down, egrets for fancy hats, muskrats and mink for fur, cattails for furniture stuffing, and mussels for pearls and buttons. Frog legs and waterfowl were killed by the thousands and served in Chicago and New York City restaurants.
To drain the water, men dug ditch upon ditch, but the marsh remained. Then men blasted a mile of limestone ledge on the river bottom in Illinois. The marsh retreated, but only a little. In 1902, steam dredges began straightening the bends and curves of the Kankakee River and doomed the marsh.
Wallace last visited the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1904. He died in 1905. In 1922, dredges bypassed the final bend of the Kankakee, turning its 250 miles of meandering river into a 90-mile-long ditch. Ninety-nine percent of the marsh drained away. Finally, the Grand Kankakee succumbed to its killers.
Loggers removed trees for lumber. In its wake, men planted rows of corn. The United States migratory bird population declined by one-fifth. No more duck, geese, cattails or frog legs shipped out. The hunt clubs vacated. The Kankakee River no longer flowed where Wallace moored The Thing.
Today, you cannot jump from muskrat den to muskrat den. Fox dens have been plowed. You won’t find mussels. There is no wild rice to harvest. Loons do not come here. Flocks of birds do not darken the sky. The marsh tries to reclaim its territory when heavy rains flood the corn fields, but the water stubbornly drains.
It would be kind to say the men who drained the Grand Kankakee Marsh did not know what they were doing. They knew. They called it progress. Men murdered that perfect spot, that tantalizing river that Lew Wallace loved. Had Wallace lived to see its death, he would have died of a broken heart.
Matt Werner is a story-teller and jack of all trades. He grew up on a farm in Union Mills, Indiana — land that once was the outer reaches of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He has authored three books — Season of Upsets, How Sweet It Is, and A White Sox Life — and numerous articles on history and interesting people. You can learn more about him at www.matthewawerner.com.
To learn more about Lew Wallace and the Grand Kankakee Marsh, watch Everglades of the North and visit the Kankakee Valley Historical Society and the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum.
