Tippecanoe
- and Kankakee too?
by Marty Lucas - 1.12.2003
Today I received an e-mail from a KRLog reader in Illinois who thanked me for telling the "truth" about the state line bridge issue. I'm not sure I know what the truth really is, but I thank the reader for his appreciation of my humble efforts in editing the KRLog.
Purely for historical reasons I hope that the state line bridge can be preserved, somewhere at least. Everyone seems to agree that it is both historically significant and beautiful. But there's a bigger issue here, and the state line bridge serves as a kind of monument to it - the management of the Kankakee River watershed in Indiana. It's poor, it's very poor. It's been bad for a century now.
It's easy for folks in Illinois to point to Indiana and say we're just a bunch of dumb Hoosiers who can't do anything right, but it's not that simple. Where I live, in Starke County, we have two watersheds - on the north the Kankakee, dredged into a big ditch pillar to post. On the south, there's the beautiful Tippecanoe, and that's another story entirely.
the Tippecanoe River at Pulaski.
The Tippecanoe has been little affected by channelization, and is ranked by the Nature Conservancy as the eighth most important river in the entire country for preserving imperiled aquatic species. [link to TNC's Tippecanoe River Project].
An ambitious plan to preserve and enhance the Tippecanoe is currently underway, including river bottom reforestation efforts, and plans to install filtration systems on agricultural drainage tiles - all to help protect the Tippey from siltation and ag runoff. Indiana's governor has endorsed this project. [link to Tippecanoe River Nominated for Environmental Funding, WISH-TV.] Interestingly, the Tippecanoe is entirely in the State of Indiana.
To the north of the Kankakee (or Upper Illinois, if you prefer) watershed lies the Great Lakes watershed. The entire Great Lakes region has seen an upsurge in environmental awareness as well. We've recently featured links about projects underway to protect the St. Joseph River of Lake Michigan, the river once linked to the Kankakee by the famous portage at South Bend.
The St. Joseph River project has also recognized the need to control agricultural sources of silt, nutrient loading and other chemicals. According to the published accounts I've seen, agricultural producers have been mostly supportive. The St. Joseph River, like the Kankakee, is in two states, in this case Indiana and Michigan.
If more progressive management practices can come to the Tippecanoe and the St. Joseph, then they can come to the Kankakee too. The headwaters shouldn't be backwaters.