There was a time, not so long ago, when the Chicago River's natural course flowed
into Lake Michigan. But as the city grew the river and the lake became more and
more polluted with raw sewage industrial chemicals and lots of animal waste from
the old stockyards. Since Lake Michigan provided the city's drinking water, the
pollution was a real problem. Typhoid, dysentery, and cholera were common. In
1854 alone, more than 1,400 people died of cholera. Enter Ellis Sylvester Chesbro.
He's the engineer who came up with the plan for the city to lay pipe for
Chicago's sewer system. But that system still emptied into the river which
emptied into the lake threatening the city's water supply.
So next Chesbro designed a two-mile long tunnel 60 feet under Lake Michigan
to draw the city's drinking water from further offshore. Workers dug around the
clock for three years to build the tunnel and after all that it still
wasn't good enough. Chicago grew and so with time, all it
took was a heavy rain for the dirty stinky river water to reach the intake.
But Chesbro had one more big idea, it was his boldest yet, "Why don't we reverse
the river and send Chicago's filth down south." It was an audacious plan and
here's how it worked: just west of Chicago is what we call a subcontinental
divide. It's a high point geographically but since the area is so flat,
you barely notice it. Still any water on the west of the divide flows
westward down toward the Mississippi. Anything to the east flows toward the
Great Lakes. Chesbro thought if we could only dig a ditch or canal
through the divide and make it deeper than both the river and the lake then
gravity would do the hard work and carry all of Chicago's dirty stinky water in
the other direction and away from the Great Lakes. It was a brilliant plan!
Unless, of course, you live downstream. At first they tried to do it by deepening
an existing canal, the Illinois and Michigan Canal had already followed that
route but that didn't do the trick. So, they would have to dig a new ditch a
bigger ditch then that's exactly what they called it the "Big Ditch."
Unfortunately, other things got in the way -- the Civil War andin the Great Fire
zapped city and state coffers. Finally, in 1892, six years after Chesbro s death,
Chicago got to work. Thousands of laborers started digging. They dug and
they dug. They used everything at their disposal -- new fangled inventions like
steam shovels, dynamite -- in the end they excavated 42 million cubic yards of rock
and soil that would fill up the Sears Tower 20 times. When opened, the canal
would connect to the Des Plaines River which would send Chicago's waste water
down the Mississippi to the Gulf. Which was a problem. Residents downstream in
places like Missouri weren't too crazy about the Big Ditch, but Chicago had an
answer, "We believed that the purifying powers of Lake Michigan would make our
stinky filthy water cleaner. The solution to pollution is dilution!" was Chicago's
mantra. But Missouri wasn't really buying it. They got to work preparing a lawsuit.
Smelling trouble, the canal builders raced to finish the project. On the
morning of January 2nd 1900, Canel Trustees undertook a secret mission.
Accompanied by selected friends, wives, and a few reporters who caught wind of
their plans, they set out in the early morning hours to strike the final blow
to the last dam holding back the river. It was harder than they thought it would
be! It took them a few tries but finally they broke open the dam, changing the
course of the river and Chicago's history. It took a couple of weeks for
Chicago's water to reach the Mississippi but its effect on both the people in
Chicago and the people downstream has lasted to this day, for better or worse.
Chicago had solved its drinking water crisis and also accomplished what is
still considered one of the greatest engineering feats in the history of the
world!