theo

A stretch of river in Indiana once took roughly 250 miles to travel a distance you could now cover in 90. Crews cut through the bends and straightened it so the surrounding country would drain. That country was the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Hundreds of thousands of acres of wet prairie, shallow water, marsh and wooded swamp spread across northwestern Indiana into Illinois. Estimates of its full extent reach about a million acres. Much of the ground people now pass as ordinary farmland belonged to that wetland. For Potawatomi communities, this was a homeland. Food, travel and daily life followed water routes through a landscape later described as needing improvement. Then came drainage ditches, dredging and a shorter river. Water that had spread across the basin was given a faster way out. Land could be planted. The straight channel is still there. So are surviving pieces of marsh, though you have to know what you’re looking at to imagine the country between them. I’d like to see an Indiana highway sign that says what used to be under the corn.