By Jennifer Young
Since the 1926 construction of Burns Harbor, officials have divided the Little Calumet into an East and West arm. The Eastern arm flows from LaPorte County through Burns Harbor, Chesterton, and Portage. The Western arm flows through or borders Indiana towns such as Gary, Munster, and Hammond and Illinois towns such as Calumet City, Lansing, Dolton, Riverdale, and Blue Island.
The arms of the Little Calumet are part of the wider Calumet River System , a formation of waterways explored by Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette in 1673 (their exploration led to settlement and the birth of Chicago). The health of the Little Calumet has much to do with Chicago’s pattern of settlement—where the working and immigrant classes lived, where industries took root. It would be a mistake to lay the blame for the Little Calumet’s high pollution levels on the steel mills, for instance. Prior to the 1930s, sewage clogged the river, so much so that only carp were known to survive there.
But industry made its own contribution, beginning with sawmills and grist mills found the Calumet River System a convenient place to dump waste. Other industries such as foundries and steel mills followed suit. In time, the Little Calumet River, in particular, became bogged down by layers of sediment containing sewage, petroleum, heavy metals, farm runoff, and chemicals for a decidedly toxic soup of unhealthy water.
That isn’t to say that there have not been attempts to clean up the Little Calumet and adjoining streams. Around the time of Prohibition, there was a considerable attempt to remove and prevent waste from entering the river. Towns like Calumet City and Hammond became popular with bootleggers; speakeasies sprouted up near the river. Even in modern times, small-time marinas attracted crowds of boaters with their bars and riverfront events.
