Improving an Unworthy River: The Army Corps and the Wabash River, 1820-1935

Abstract

How does a heavily engineered river become free-flowing? Indiana's Wabash River reportedly contains the longest free-flowing stretch of water east of the Mississippi. But water in the Wabash wasn't always free-flowing. For more than one hundred years, local, state, and federal actors attempted to engineer the sandy and serpentine Wabash into a water highway that would connect the Ohio River with the Great Lakes. Among the actors attempting to engineer the Wabash into a navigable stream, the Army Corps of Engineers were most active. Their efforts included the construction of dams and dikes, and the dredging of the river bottom to increase its depth for steamers. But for each of these interventions, the Wabash pushed back. Dams were destroyed by ice, snags were redeposited, and upstream sediment filled prior excavations. This article analyzes the lower Wabash River as an envirotechnical system, examining the feedbacks that occurred between technology and hydrology between 1820 and 1935.