Mile 90: Lyons, Illinois
First visit: Dec. 30, 2022 Public trail? No Private land? Undoubtedly Distance walked: 1.5 miles
For historic, geographic, and symbolic significance, there is no place on the Des Plaines River of greater consequence than the Chicago Portage Site, and that goes for both for the river and the city. In fact, at the risk of hyperbole, Chicago wouldn’t be the Chicago we know without this portage, and a visit to this site will help explain why.
The Chicago Portage Site is the nexus point joining north and south (aka Upper and Lower) on the Des Plaines River. Located off of a busy section of Harlem Avenue just north of I-55 in Lyons, it’s part of the National Park System but owned by the Cook County Forest Preserve, and pays tribute to the role this area played in establishing Chicago as the commercial crossroads of North America.
There are scores of references that explain the legacy of this area, but if you aren’t sure whether you’re completely up to speed, here’s my Executive Summary: native Americans showed 17th-century European explorers how they got from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, using a short land portage between the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River – about four miles when dry, and connected by something called Mud Lake when flooded – near the present-day Forest Preserve site. Later visitors advocated for the construction of a canal to replace the portage, which begat the I&M (Illinois and Michigan) Canal, which would in turn be replaced by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which would also be the means for reversing the flow of the Chicago River away from Lake Michigan. [deep breath]
Put another way: that brief route between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers ultimately linked the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Gulf of Mexico, facilitating a quantum leap in trade. This is how Chicago became literally the center of commerce on this continent, and why, “In recognition of its historic and cultural importance, the Chicago Portage was dedicated a National Historic Site in 1952, making it a unit of the National Park System in non-federal ownership,” according to the National Park Service.
That time the river was moved
While the Des Plaines River, like virtually all rivers, has been subjected to various degrees of human intervention during its history, the most dramatic example is in this area, where the river’s naturally meandering course was straightened out and moved in the late 1800’s to make room for the construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It is here, in my view, that its entire character changes from urban river to working waterway. If I may quote yet another authority, this time the Encyclopedia of Chicago (courtesy the Chicago Historical Society and the Newberry Library): “If one stands near the Santa Fe Railroad bridge near Stony Ford, it is possible to view the original 8,000-year-old river channel to the north and the altered 100-year-old channel to the south. At Lockport, south of the confluence between the Sanitary Canal and the Des Plaines, the river resumes its original course.”
The Santa Fe Railroad bridge, incidentally, is only about a half-mile from the Chicago Portage site, but there are no official trails that will take you there. This hasn’t deterred enterprising types from making their own trails.
The Portage Site celebrates some of the biggest names of the explorer game, or at least the Chicago edition: Frenchmen Louis Jolliet (one or two l’s, people?) and missionary Father Jacques Marquette, legends on equal footing among Chicagoans with Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (whose name sounds French, but whose true provenance is disputed to this day). Long forgotten are the names of the natives and Voyageurs who literally did all the heavy lifting, but in their stead we learn about Gurdon Hubbard, an old school fur trader who got sick of portaging his canoe, became a member of the Illinois legislature, and lobbied successfully for the construction of the first canal to link the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers: the Illinois and Michigan (I&M) Canal.
The I&M Canal, completed in 1848, was a commercial sensation, but was quickly deemed too narrow and shallow for increasingly larger vessels (see also the history of the Erie Canal), and was soon replaced by the larger Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
I’ll cover the implications of the San Ship merger later – in fact, I’ll cover it next if you’re reading my Top 5 list in order. While that may ultimately prove a point of epic consequence to both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, its construction required some drastic alteration to the Des Plaines River: literally moving it out of its original riverbed and into an artificial channel slightly north of its original course. This channel runs roughly twenty miles south and west, and represents the most significant human intervention in the known history of the river – besides its subsequent merger with the San Ship Canal, which we’ll get to.
What you can’t see here (hint: it’s the river)
Trails at the Portage site are part of the Salt Creek Trail System, which may partly explain why I had to go off trail here to see the Des Plaines, and the train trestle mentioned by the Encyclopedia of Chicago.
That’s right. I know I already said it, but I feel like it bears repeating: you can’t actually see the Des Plaines River at what is arguably its most consequential site. At least not officially.
I’ve described my habit of going off trail on many of my hikes, which is inadvisable for so many reasons that mothers shouldn’t even let their children continue reading the rest of this paragraph. In any case, I did it here too, because I wanted to see that train trestle, and the view promised from it. Using the location feature on my phone I ended up finding an uphill path off of the official trails, which took me to a tall chain link fence that had been cut open and rolled back – long ago, by the looks of the well-worn tracks on either side. Once inside that fence the train trestle was easily accessed, both from above and below, where I found myself trudging amidst the grimiest floodway I’d encountered along the river yet, a wide expanse of smelly muck that could have been the La Brea Tarpits.
Nonetheless, looking upriver from beneath the south side of the trestle, you can indeed see what the Encyclopedia of Chicago says is the original river channel, which widens as it comes out from under the bridge before abruptly turning southwest. This is the new channel. If you’re crazy and/or obsessed enough to keep going on this fugitive trail, you could follow the rerouted river from atop a quarry road, where it lies beyond a strip of thick woodland descending down to the water. And/or you could drive over to Lawndale Avenue and walk a mile of soft gravel berm to see the new channel from the other side.
To me, this is the exact point where the river turns all business. And that quarry is a harbinger of what awaits downstream.