It seems so simple.
If you live in a house that occasionally has floodwaters running through
it, you have two options. You can move
from that house with its flood prone location or you can move the house away
from the floodwaters. In either option,
you are relocating away from the floodwaters.
It seems like a clear-cut solution to the problem, but here in the
Kickapoo Valley it has not always been so simple to achieve.
“The last rescue proved to be one of the
most dangerous. The family of Cora Henry
was stranded in their home, the original Dempster Seely house, on the northern
end of the village in Seelyburg. The
house stood several hundred feet out in the still raging floodwater. Dave Elliot, who had been rescuing people for
nearly twelve hours, decided to get to the Henry house. Four times he flung his boat into the raging
torrent, but was washed downstream before getting to the house. Finally he launched his boat far up shore
from the house and negotiated the torrents to land at the front porch of the
Henry house. Mrs. Henry and her four
children were quickly loaded into the boat for the long haul back to
shore. A tired Elliot started to row
through the swirling muddy waters. It
was a terrific pull and when he was still many yards from the shore, Elliot was
unable to row farther and called for help.
Five youths on shore, Royal Donovan, Si Paul, Cedric Neefe, Francis Moon,
and Furley Hodge, some of the same young lads who had begun the original rescue
the night before, plunged into the water and pulled the loaded boat to
safety. Miraculously, none of La Farge’s
residents were seriously injured or killed in the mammoth flood.”
This
harrowing account from the 1935 Kickapoo River flood, which I excerpted from
Chapter 5 of Volume I of my history of La Farge book, describes the terror and
danger inherent in the great floods of the Kickapoo. Again, it seems so simple; move the people
and the houses away from the path of the river’s floodwaters. Relocate out of
the flood’s path. Easier said than done
in the Kickapoo Valley.
To
understand why “relocation” was such an unpopular concept for much of the
history of flood control efforts in the Valley, perhaps we need to go back to
the beginning as to why people settled so close to the Kickapoo River in the
first place. Why does someone build a
house in a river’s floodway?
Many of the
first people to settle in the area around La Farge were drawn to the region
because of the potential of waterpower provided by the Kickapoo River. In the narratives of the original land
surveys done in 1846 and conducted by the federal government surveying team, it
was noted the potential for waterpower by damming up the Kickapoo River near La
Farge. In describing waterpower
potential, the surveyor’s narrative mentions in particular a site in section 20
(what would become Seelyburg) and another in section 28 (in the area where Bear
and Otter Creeks join the Kickapoo) that would be excellent places for dams and
mills.
Thomas and
Anson DeJean and Dempster Seely would soon follow and construct the dams and
mills at those places on the Kickapoo.
They also built houses right next to the river, close by their mill
sites. As the lumbering boom followed in
the northern Kickapoo Valley, many of those who worked at the mills also built
houses along the river. Soon villages
bloomed along the banks of the Kickapoo from Ontario to Steuben. And those villages, being constructed in the
later half of the 19th century, flourished during those early years
of existence. Were they hit with
catastrophic floods in those early years, like they would be in the following
20th century?
Evidence would suggest these early settlements
were not in peril from the Kickapoo’s mighty floods, so common after 1900. Those early settlers were not stupid people,
who would establish their entire towns in harms way. Prudent men would not build houses in areas
where the safety of their family might be in jeopardy because of rushing
floodwater, would they? What happened to
a river where it was once safe to build communities along its banks?
The very nature of the watershed
that supported the river changed drastically in those early years of settlement
along the Kickapoo. The change in the
watershed caused the river to undergo drastic changes as well. It is not to say that the river did not flood
during those early years of settlement, because all rivers have floods and the
Kickapoo was not an exception. But those
early floods must have been tolerable for the people who lived near the
Kickapoo River, because the riverside settlements continued to grow and
prosper. It was the river that changed; by
the end of the nineteenth century, the Kickapoo River became a flooding
machine.
No comments:
Post a Comment