A century ago, northwestern Indiana's Grand Kankakee Marsh and river, once one of North America's most important migratory bird and wildlife habitats, began a conversion to a series of straight drainage ditches. Gone were the gentle natural meanders of the river; gone most of the wetlands. In their place, real estate development, urbanization, and farming, which often proved ill-advised and unproductive. The Kankakee historically received tributary inputs from eight northwestern Indiana counties, as well as several more on the Illinois side (which had not been as manipulated as in Indiana). From the lzaak Walton League's founding in 1922, restoration of this badly damaged watershed had been a defining goal. The Marsh had once covered some 500,000 acres, its river meandering over 250 miles of the Hoosier landscape. By 1918, it had become a 90-mile silty water trench. As time was running out, the League changed the effort to hardball, and in 1980 the Indiana Division sued the Kankakee River Basin Commission challenging a proposal for a large scale dredging project. And KRBC withdrew the plan. Four years later, the League's Griffith Chapter, fully backed by the state organization, sued again, this time challenging an 11-county drainage board's proposal to establish a basin-wide drainage tax to carry out its ditch projects. The League won again, when the board could not prove its proposed projects would benefit all of those taxed. In 1994, Griffith Chapter again led the League's interests as one of the founding Partners of the Indiana Grand Kankakee Marsh Restoration Project, with a goal of restoring 26,000 acres of the adjacent wetlands over a 10-year period. Indiana's Porter County Chapter subsequently became a Partner. Then the pace quickened in 1997, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded several alternative studies which could result in a 30,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge including parts of the watershed in both Indiana and Illinois. Supported by strong feasibility studies and a 3:1 favorable public commentary, the project was officially endorsed by the EWS in August 1999. Thus, a century of habitat destruction in the Kankakee watershed seemed halted; but the funding and implementation may still consume many decades of the Third Millennium. The lzaak Walton League will be there to help make it happen.

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