The Most Crooked River in the World

An imaginative history of the Kankakee River, told in reverse chronological order, that examines the ecological losses caused as people transformed the river and its wetlands

The Kankakee River, whose waters gathered west of present-day South Bend, Indiana, and meandered through the loose sediment left by Pleistocene glaciers, used to drain one of the largest wetlands in North America. In its prime, it had hundreds of bends and spilled everywhere, generating hundreds of thousands of acres of permanent and semipermanent marshes brimming with life. This landscape amazed, entertained, and fed human beings for centuries until a small group of reformers usurped the waters and drained them in a matter of decades. By 1917, steam dredges had cut through the bends of the river; ditches and underground drain tiles emptied the marshes. A fascinating and vibrant place was thus transformed into a monotonous and forgettable one.

Jon T. Coleman travels backward through time to recover the grandeur of the Kankakee River and its wetlands, asking why American settlers would dismantle an environment in which they delighted. Starting in the present, Coleman unwinds the history of the Kankakee, offering a wide-ranging and imaginative look at what was lost when the Kankakee was transformed, in a narrative that challenges our ideas about time and inevitability.