Down here at water level you get engine noise, gulls, and a slow green river with tour boats sliding along it. That river is flowing the wrong way. Not by accident, and not by a little. Chicago turned it around on purpose, and it's been running backwards ever since.
The reason is unglamorous. Chicago sits on a flat swamp with almost no slope, and for most of the eighteen hundreds this river was the city's sewer. Slaughterhouse waste, factory runoff, the sewage of a million people — all of it went in, and the river carried all of it into Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan was the drinking water. Chicago spent decades pouring its own filth into its own glass, and had one of the worst typhoid death rates in the country to show for it.
They tried the obvious fix first. They pushed the water intake two miles out into the lake. The filth caught up with it.
So the city dug a twenty-eight-mile canal across the continental divide and dropped the level at the far end. That pulled the whole river in
land — away from the lake, down toward the Mississippi, and out of Chicago's problem. It took eight years and moved more earth than the Panama Canal would move a decade later.
Now, Missouri had been watching all this with alarm, and its lawyers were about to file for an injunction. So Chicago did not hold an opening ceremony.
At dawn on January second, nineteen hundred, a handful of officials an
