suppose there were ever any better duck resorts out of doors for the sportsmen

of Chicago than the Fox Lake Chain of Lakes, located about 50 miles north of

Chicago; the Calumet lakes, just south of Chicago; the "Illinois

Bottoms," especially at Bureau County and Senachwine Lake, which spanned

the Putnam-Marshall County line along the Illinois River, and the

"Kankakee" in Indiana. The Kankakee Marsh along with the Illinois

River furnished the highways of all the large flights east of the Mississippi

River, with the exception of the coast.

and marshes of the Kankakee River—called the “Grand Marsh”—spread across northwestern

Indiana from western St. Joseph County into Illinois. The Kankakee River had

its course near South Bend, and flowed in a southwesterly direction parallel

to, and about 35 miles south of Lake Michigan. It was the dividing line between

Laport and Stark, Porter and Jasper, and Lake and Newton Counties in Indiana.

It crossed the line of the state into Kankakee County, Illinois, about 40 miles

southwest of Chicago, where it joined with the Des Plaines River, with the two

forming the Illinois River near Au Sable, Grundy County, Illinois.

Marsh was a maze of multiple marshes interspersed with sinuous sandy ridges of

higher and drier land. The wild-rice and smartweed fields within were the

scenes of countless geese and ducks and other wildfowl, which found there their

ideal harvest by day, and in the neighboring swamp their haven by night. In its

course along Stark and Laport Counties, the country was low and marshy; marshes

running back in places for two and three miles. These marshes were covered with

a rank growth of wild rice, affording fine feeding grounds for waterfowl. This

region was long known to the sportsmen for as fine waterfowl shooting as could

be found in the country.

with a moniker of “Everglades of the North,” at its greatest extent covered

more than 500,000 acres of land at a depth of 3-4 feet. However, there were

really two sections of the marsh: the "upper marsh" of some 600,000

acres that was usually but not permanently flooded and the "lower marsh,"

or Grand Marsh, of about 400,000 acres, which remained flooded throughout the

year and was spread out over sections of eight different counties. At the lower

marsh, from the prowl of a boat, one could see for ten miles south a level,

green stretch of water vegetation interrupted only by an occasional upland oak

grove on a sandy knoll or ridge, or by a cluster of closely set pin oaks rising

out of the water. Here where the ducks bred and here in the fall and especially

in the spring when the freshets came, the marsh was full of market hunters and guides

with their sportsmen in push boats, using not oars but a push pole, and the

song of the shotgun was heard everywhere.

marsh were three lakes: the very large Beaver Lake and two smaller lakes, Mud

and English, the former was a widening of the Kankakee River but it had only a

slight current, so it was really a swamp that varied in size from year to year and

filled with thousands of acres of wild rice and other aquatic plants

alternating with open water and mud flats. Beaver Lake, as did English Lake,

offered not only great duck shooting but also great shooting of the erratic

wayfaring snipe. Together, with the marshes, a million acres of fish and wildlife

paradise. It was North American equivalent of the African Serengeti.