Mile 74: Chicago (DPRT)
First visit: Dec. 12, 2022 Public trail? Yes Private land? Yes Miles walked: 3.4 miles
Just like Mayor Richard J. Daley once said of the Chicago Police, I’m not here to create disorder, I’m here to preserve disorder. In that spirit, let’s treat as fact the prevailing and otherwise erroneous view that there are three rivers flowing within city limits: the Chicago River, the Little Calumet River, and the Des Plaines River. Of these, the only naturally flowing river is the Des Plaines. In fact, nowadays the other two rivers effectively and unnaturally flow into the Des Plaines, their courses amazingly reversed last century via the Sanitary and Ship Canal in order to carry the city’s waste away from Lake Michigan. Nitpickers like me would also point out that the Chicago River isn’t technically a river at all, but rather a “network of waterways”, of which the north and south branches are separate rivers with separate sources, merging to form a third river called the main branch. Or they did, when they used to flow naturally out to Lake Michigan.
Raise your hand if you know that Chicago sits on top of a continental divide. (I didn’t.) That’s why the Chicago and Calumet Rivers used to flow east into Lake Michigan, while the Des Plaines, on the other side of the divide, flowed west towards the Mississippi. It still does, as do the other two now, after engineers figured out how to reverse their flows and piggyback them onto the Des Plaines. After that the two rivers stopped spewing disease all over Chicago, and we got the continent’s largest inland shipping channel into the bargain, which is what makes the Des Plaines the most consequential river in Chicago. (Alas, though it is no longer the river’s mouth, the main branch does continue to serve a vitally important function for the city by being dyed emerald green for St. Patrick’s Day.)
But for all that, most Chicagoans probably don’t realize the Des Plaines River actually flows within the city, and that assumes they’ve even heard of it. Unless, that is, they live in the O’Hare neighborhood, split between the 38th and 41st wards on the city’s far northwest side. Chances are that residents in this area drive over the river on Higgins, Lawrence, Irving Park Rd. or Belmont. Many more Chicagoans drive over it on the Kennedy Expressway. It’s also the only place where one of the city’s iconic el lines passes over the river.
People in the O’Hare neighborhood likely also see the deer that regularly congregate near E. River Road, on the edge of the Catherine Chevalier Woods. They may even picnic or hike at Chevalier Woods, or the massive Schiller Woods just down the road at Cumberland and Irving. The Des Plaines River, and the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT), pass through them both.
Trailus Interruptus
Unlike in Lake County to the north, hikers along the DPRT encounter several trail interruptions in Cook County, the longest coming between Higgins Rd. and Chevalier Woods. But that doesn’t mean the river isn’t viewable by foot, which I had to figure out for myself the day I followed Willow Creek and its 52 million gallons of treated sewage towards its date with the Des Plaines River.
This merger point can most easily be seen from the cemetery at the All Saints Cathedral Parish off of Higgins Rd. and the river – not to be confused with the other All Saints cemetery, also on the river, off Central Rd. in Des Plaines. Which my GPS did confuse (always blame the technology), which gave me an opportunity to see the river from both cemeteries, 5.5 miles apart. It turned out to be a study in contrasts, the larger cemetery to the north a more pastoral setting than the one off Higgins, which sits in an O’Hare landing pattern and stares nakedly at Rosemont’s hotel cluster across the river. And the Willow Creek merger.
All told, the walkable distance here was only about a thousand feet, and while cemeteries are a great place to walk, they’re generally not great for going off trail, where you’re either stepping around graves or stepping through broken barriers. (Why do cemeteries have fences? Because people are dying to get in.) But if you suffer from river-induced OCD, cemeteries offer some unique and secluded river views, as I’ll discuss in more detail in my Forest Park section. And this one offers a view of the Willow Creek merger, the largest discharge stream on the river so far. I first came here on a cold day in early February, and it was obvious the discharge water keeps the river flowing while ice forms along the riverbanks.
The Catherine Chevalier Woods, named for the wife of Alex Robinson, a Scot-Odawa Indian who was named an honorary chief of the native Potawatomi just long enough to give their land away, is a popular oasis in a crowded neighborhood. The resident deer (said to overpopulate the woods) seem always present, the pavilions and picnic groves are booked months in advance, and there is a pedestrian bridge linking the forest preserve to neighboring Rosemont’s central hotel and restaurant district. I saw as many people entering the preserve from Rosemont as I saw driving in and parking off of E. River Rd.
Construction season in Chicago
The main DPRT leg here was under construction during my first visit in 2022, but I walked it anyway, following its muddy debris-strewn shoulder all the way to Irving Park Rd. When I came back in October 2023 the work was mostly done, revealing some entirely new infrastructure including a lengthy boardwalk and a bridge over Lawrence Ave., which looks similar to the one over Lake Cook Rd. in Northbrook.
Between Lawrence and Irving Park Rd. the trail winds its way over an ancient stone footbridge that likely predates the WPA and CCC works evident elsewhere throughout the forest preserves, examples of which are scattered all along the DPRT. These include shelters, gazebos, viewing platforms and other outbuildings and amenities built during the Great Depression, and though some are still somehow intact, most are now reduced to remnants and rubble.
South of the massive Schiller Woods preserve the path runs on the western edge of the city’s Indian Boundary Golf Course, which looks better from almost anywhere than it does from the trail, where hikers see arson-damaged fencing that allows deer to placidly graze the fairways. Across the river, near Irving Park Rd., is a canoe launch where I frequently see people fly fishing, though I can’t say whether they catch many flies there [audience laughs].
Native American history
The name Indian Boundary remains in use not only at the golf course, but at many points along the Des Plaines River, and indeed throughout the larger metro area. There’s the Indian Boundary Family Picnic Area near the golf course, an Indian Boundary Park on Chicago’s north side and an Indian Boundary YMCA in Downers Grove. Depending on where you encounter it, it generally represents a boundary line once negotiated between local tribes – mainly the Potawatomi, but also the Odawa and Ojibwe, collectively called the Council of Three Fires – and European colonizers. Amazingly, to me at least, some of these boundaries were still in effect as recently as two hundred years ago. Though officially land boundaries, which were overrode in relatively short order anyway, these were really people boundaries, beyond which Native Americans were prohibited, and as the years passed and local tribes were increasingly displaced, the name simply stuck, like a bad habit. It seems doubtful that many people today give much thought to the meaning behind the term, but it’s a literal and unsubtle sign of forced segregation by the U.S. government.
The glacial retreat that formed our familiar waterways, from the Great Lakes to the Des Plaines River, occurred some 14,000 years ago. The first humans are said to have arrived here during the Paleo-Indian era, around 10,000 BC, likely following animal trails to and along the different waterways, where they established camps and took advantage of the benefits of these waters for sustenance, transportation and trade. Among the animals they hunted right here was the American Mastodon. Successive eras saw these Native Americans evolve and advance, developing tools, practicing agriculture and banding into communities, as they did all across North America.
Then the Europeans came, arriving in this area in the mid-1600s, and though we honor the Frenchmen Marquette and Jolliet for first portaging the Des Plaines in 1673, the local natives had been doing it for centuries and were already trading with the Voyageurs by then. To the extent any of this was memorialized, only fragments of that history remain, though some is writ quite large on the city even to this day: the names we use such as Chicago, Mettawa and Saganashkee; the roads we travel that began as Indian trails, such as Grand Ave., Milwaukee Ave. and Northwest Highway; even our occasionally professional hockey club name.
A map of Chicago copyrighted by Alfred F. Scharf in 1900 showing “Indian Trails and Villages of Chicago and of Cook, DuPage and Will Counties” circa 1804, along with the various trails-turned-roads, is a useful document both for preserving this history and for reminding us of the decimation of native lands under colonial expansion. Many of these early civilizations honored their dead in burial mounds, once found all over the Chicago area, and up and down the Des Plaines River. Today, the closest remaining burial mounds to Chicago are the Briscoe Mounds, a 13th century archaeological preserve in Channahon near where the Des Plaines and Du Page Rivers meet.
In 2024 I began leading hikes along the Des Plaines River for the Friends of the Forest Preserves, and usually start at the end of the DPRT at Sunset Bridge Meadow in River Grove. While some have suggested there may once have been a Black CCC camp in this area, the Scharf map shows there was in fact a large Indian reservation here, along with the “Kennicut Mounds”. Their fate is presently unknown to me, but at the time they were described this way:
“…consisting of a close group of five separate mounds each with a diameter of from ten to twenty-five feet, and three feet high. The group has a monumental aspect, upon a forty-foot-high riverbank of yellow clay now covered with a second growth of timber. The view is uninterrupted over the river and several miles of prairie with the mound builders trail in the distance.”
One can only imagine, of course, because all of that is now Melrose Park. I don’t know if the mound builder’s trail survived to become a road, but it is honored, at least in spirit, at Horner Park on the city’s north side.
Where the DPRT meets Belmont Ave. was something called Robinson’s Reservation, a two-square-mile land grant to Alexander Robinson, “honorary” chief of the Potawatomi tribe, in 1829. This gift of the federal government was in exchange for Robinson’s role in ceding massive tracts of native land without a fight, and in a treaty ratified by President John Tyler in 1843, was to be the property of Robinson and his heirs “forever”. It was of course taken away anyway, though some of that land now comprises the Cook County Forest Preserves of Robinson Woods, Che Che Pin Qua Woods, and Catherine Chevalier Woods, named for his wife.
The Potawatomi called the river “Sheshickmawishsippe”. Translated this meant “soft maple tree” referring to the large number of silver maples along the riverbank. Not that I saw mention of this anywhere. In my walks along the river, on trails that humans conceivably began walking 12,000 years before I did, there isn’t a lot that commemorates the first people who lived here. Aside from a few plaques here and there, and some educational displays at the Portage Site and at nature centers such as the Ryerson Conservation Area, the focus tends to be more on nature and natural history. The most impressive exhibit I’ve come across is at Isle a la Cache in Romeoville, which recreates the features of an 18th century Potawatomi village during the time of the Voyageurs.
I’ve encountered people on my DPRT hikes who say that artifacts like arrowheads and pottery shards are still occasionally found along the trail, especially after heavy rains. Although our bedrock here is mainly dolomite limestone, there is a fair amount of shale and flint as well, and because it is more brittle it tends to break into geometric fragments that I’ve mistaken for arrowheads many times. Which shouldn’t be surprising, as they were favored for tools and arrowheads for just that reason.
Being Chicago’s other river
All throughout the Chicago section of the DPRT – and indeed, throughout most of the Cook County portion – hikers will see signs near outfalls and culverts warning of toxic discharge, with a number to call if you see discharge during dry weather – presumably a sign of either a major malfunction or a legal violation of sewer use. This is the result of the combination wastewater/sewer lines common throughout Cook County, which can and do still direct untreated overflow directly into the river. I’ve unfortunately had to contend with water like this that has backed up into my basement, and I can tell you it’s some horrendous and unnamable degree of disgusting. I can’t help thinking about the aquatic life, especially, that gets exposed to this, but it’s a hazard of living on an urban river, anywhere and everywhere.
There are other hazards too, enough so that in Cook County it isn’t unusual to see emergency call boxes dotting the trails. And the trails themselves, though getting better, are still the least improved trails I walked along the Des Plaines.
Having said all of that, and despite the river’s invisibility to most Chicagoans, this is still a popular destination, and is included in an ambitious, even visionary city plan for improving public awareness and access. Called Great Rivers Chicago, the proposed plan, as articulated by the Metropolitan Planning Council, also highlights the Calumet River, I&M Canal, Sanitary and Ship Canal, and improvements to Goose Island, on the north branch of the Chicago River. Sadly, however, of the eight projects chosen for funding in 2023, none of them affect the Des Plaines River.
I’m telling you, it gets no respect.