Salt Creek

A confession that I was once a promoter
of industrial development,
and a discovery later in life that
Wallace Stegner and I have something in common


I grew up in a pretty neat place. You might not think so. It was ten miles east of the smoky steel-making city of Gary, Indiana, where my dad was a steelworker. We lived a hundred or so yards north of US 20 on a side road that led a mile north to US 12. A mile north of there was Lake Michigan. Although you might think Lake Michigan was an asset, I have to say that my family and I made little use of it except for rare visits to Indiana Dunes State Park. Our house was in a neighborhood of a half-dozen houses and a corner gas station and grocery store. In my youngest years, there were also two farms in operation, one of which was a truck farm specializing in tomatoes. The neighborhood had no name. It wasn’t a town, it wasn’t rural, and it wasn’t a suburb. It was sort of in-between. What was best about it for a kid like me was that I could walk north on the road, past the last of the houses, through fields, and into woods along lanes (whose reason-for-being I never wondered about), and then poke along the banks of Salt Creek and the Little Calumet River.

Sometimes, I went with other kids; often it was just me and my dog. I drew maps of the area and made up place names like Lone Oak, Fisherman’s Bluff, Twin Pines, and Bullhead Falls. I learned the names of many of the trees; we had folk names for stickerweeds, snotweeds, and other wildflowers; and I paid enough attention to other plants that I can name some of them now, such as butterflyweeds, puccoons, and sweet ferns, even though I never knew their names then. There were sandy hills forested with oaks and other trees, and, next to the road, a pair of what we called “sand pits,” which I believe were former sand mines. We made toy roads and tunnels on the sandy slopes in the summers and sledded downhill along the rim of the biggest sand pit in the winters—and loved it best when we missed a turn and tumbled down the slope. Bullhead Falls was a real waterfall that doesn’t exist anymore. I recall that it was about five feet high, but I was smaller myself at the time, so I might be exaggerating. As I think back on it, I suspect that a layer of peat was responsible for the falls, for I remember a peat fire smoldering for weeks not far away. But we had a big flood one year. A jaw-dropper, it was. We had never seen anything close to it before (or since). The creek came up ten feet or more, and, after it went back down, Bullhead Falls was gone.

I’ve told you these things so you will understand how embarrassing it is for me to admit that I was opposed to a 1958 proposal for a national park in the Indiana Dunes. The proposal had been made in reaction to plans for creating a port and constructing new steel mills in the dunes. As much as I loved nature, I bought in, lock, stock, and barrel, to the argument that we needed “a port, not a park.” Not that my position on the issue made any difference. I was not even twenty years old at the time, a naive college student, uninvolved politically. It’s true that I had a summer job as editor of the Portage News, but, in that capacity, I simply did as I was told, and our coverage of issues was limited to purely local ones in the newly incorporated municipality of Portage. Decisions as to whether there would a national park, a port, or new steel mills—as vital as they were to the future of our town—seemed remote and beyond our influence as far as I understood things at the time. I do remember writing an editorial arguing that Indiana Dunes State Park provided all the protection of the dunes that was needed. “The majority of the park isn’t even developed,” I wrote, meaning (as I see it now) that only part of the lovely forests, sand dunes, and beach had been converted to parking lots, bathhouses, and roped-off swimming areas. The outcome of those conflicts—the compromise that resulted—was the patchwork of industry and parkland that’s found along Indiana’s Lake Michigan shore today.

A Bethlehem Steel mill now stands directly north of our old neighborhood, on land where I once—but only once—walked through the dunes to the lake and back. A neighbor of ours, who had been the basketball coach at the high school, took a job as an agent for the company that bought up land for Bethlehem. One night, he invited me to ride with him in a jeep along a sand road to the lakeshore cottage of an elderly woman who was being evicted and was in the process of moving. That was the first time I had ever been in those dunes. The woman’s house, like others in the same area, had no electricity. It haunts now me to think of how interesting that woman must have been, and how sad her moving. It was through those same dunes that I later walked. Once.


It’s bad enough to want something and not get it. It’s worse to discover that you wanted the wrong thing. Why didn’t I want a national park in my town? We said we wanted jobs, but everyone that we knew had a job. Our neighbors might have benefited from increased property values, but my family didn’t even own property; we rented our house. All I can say by way of explanation is that there was a lot I didn’t know about my town. The newspapers that we read were totally in favor of the port and the steel mills. I recall feeling proud that my town was going to have “the most modern steel mill in the world” and fascinated by plans for the construction of new highways. In Indiana, support for the park was blamed on Senator Paul Douglas from Illinois and “people from Chicago.” My family had no friends or acquaintances who were pro-park. The schools that I attended taught us nothing about the dunes. We never had a field trip there (and never had one to any of Gary's already-existing steel mills either). Given my interests and natural inclinations, any one of those things could have tipped the balance. But none of them happened.

Wallace Stegner grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan and knew nothing of its local history until he was an adult and had long since moved away. What he learned then, and wrote about in Wolf Willow, would have captivated him when he was a boy. As an adult, he was resentful of what he had been deprived of in childhood. “What strikes me about this in recollection," he wrote, "is ... the fact that the information I was gaining from literature and from books on geography and history had not the slightest relevance to the geography, history, or life of the place where I lived. Living in the Cypress Hills, I did not even know I lived there, and hadn’t the faintest notion of who had lived there before me.... The world I knew was immediate, not comparative; seen flat, without perspective. Knowledge of place, knowledge of the past, meant to me knowledge of the far and foreign” [Stegner 1962: 27-28].

Here are things I never learned about Portage until I had long since moved away:

• The sandy hills where we walked and sledded and climbed to dizzy heights in a tall cottonwood tree were part of the Calumet Beach Ridge, one of a series of arcs of old sand dunes representing ancient shorelines of Lake Michigan, formed when water levels were higher.
  
• My boyhood walks took me along sections of an old stagecoach road between Detroit and Chicago (which had been an Indian trail before that) and to the site of a fearsome bridge remembered by every person who traveled the road.
  
• Movies were made in the early years of the motion picture industry at Dune Park, little more than a mile from our house.
  
• Octave Chanute conducted glider experiments in the same area, resulting in significant advances in the development of flight.
  
• A Pottawatomi Indian village was once located near the intersection of Crisman Road and US 20, a mile west of our house.
  
• Later on, a station on the underground railroad was located in the same area.
  
• Some of the earliest work in the science of ecology was conducted in the dunes by Professor Henry Cowles of the University of Chicago. The principal site of Cowles’s work was the Central Dunes, precisely those dunes straight north of our neighborhood that I walked through. Once.
  
• A Dunes National Park had been proposed as early as 1916.
  
• Edwin Way Teale wrote Dune Boy about boyhood summers on his grandparents’ farm near Furnessville—a book that I would have read with relish if I had known about it. Furnessville was less than ten miles from our house.
  
• The naturalist Donald Culross Peattie, the painter Frank Dudley, the landscape architect Jens Jensen, and the poets Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg all found inspiration in the landscape just north of our house.

Just as Stegner grew up in the Cypress Hills and didn’t know it, I grew up on the Calumet Beach Ridge and didn’t know it.


Sacred Sands by Ronald J. Engel, published in 1983, tells the history of efforts to preserve the Indiana Dunes. Plans for steel mills in the dunes east of Gary were made as early as the 1930s. The Save the Dunes Council was formed in 1952 with the goal of adding the Central Dunes to the state park. According to Engel, “Pilgrimages, pageants, testimonials or ‘hearings,’ slide shows, movies, photographs, posterettes, poetry, songs, paintings, etchings, stories—all were used as tools of evangelism to persuade the uncommitted to share the Dunes revelation and to join in a covenant for their protection” [Engel 1983: 242-43]. I was not aware of any of that. It’s true that neither I nor my parents were joiners or attenders-of-events, and we would have viewed the “dunes people” as superior to our social class, so we probably wouldn’t have participated in the council’s activities even if we’d been invited. Nevertheless, I was a potential convert, and I’m pretty sure I was never invited.

Engel also tells of a “pilgrimage to the dunes” which was “one of the high points” of Senator Paul Douglas’s campaign to create an Indiana Dunes National Monument. The pilgrimage occurred on July 23, 1961, during the time that I was editor of the Portage News. “The caravan drove cross-country around bogs and marshes and past Mud Lake to the beach, where it was joined by members of the Save the Dunes Council for a hike along the shore.... At the conclusion of the hike, at about the site of the proposed port, the entourage stopped to inspect a large blowout and to hear brief discourses on the ecology of the Dunes from members of the council” [265]. Why wasn’t the editor of the Portage News invited to that? Or was I, and my publisher never told me about it? It was another event that surely would have influenced my thinking. Who knows what I might have written favorable to the save-the-duners’ cause for our little weekly newspaper? I’m quite sure that, at the time, I was susceptible not only to pro-park arguments, but also to the idea of compromise. I wrote more than one editorial lamenting the divisiveness of local politics and pleading for solutions that respected the interests of all sides. I might well have written similar editorials about the industry-versus-park issue. True, it might have had little effect. Indeed, it might have had none because our publisher might have quashed it. But, if he had, I might have gotten pissed off and quit. Who knows? I might have joined the Save the Dunes Council.

What Engel calls the “final blow” came on March 30, 1962. Bethlehem Steel had contracted for the removal of sand from the Central Dunes. “Within the year, the heart of the Central Dunes was gone. The wildest and largest area of the Dunes outside the Indiana Dunes State Park, the center of maximum ecological diversity, the landscape of moving dunes where Cowles did his first research on plant succession—was no more” [271]. Douglas and the Save the Dunes Council at least succeeded in saving the crumbs. Compromise legislation was passed in 1966. The port opened in 1970; the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was dedicated in 1972. By then, I was living in Ithaca, New York, gone from Portage for ten years.


My old haunts along the Little Calumet River and Salt Creek were added to the national lakeshore in 1986. It pleases me greatly that places I loved so much when I was a boy are now part of the park, even though they seem to have been included for pretty sketchy reasons. The only thing I could find about them in a history of the national lakeshore was a single sentence, which said simply: “In addition, segments of the Little Calumet and Salt Creek were incorporated in order to lessen management difficulties” [Cockrell 1988: 34]. Whatever that means. It also seemed, as far as Laurie and I could tell, that no one in the National Park Service knew or cared very much about the area. When we traveled through Indiana in 2001, we tried to get to my old familiar stretches of Salt Creek. We had already tried and failed in previous years. The problem was that Samuelson Road now ended a short distance north of the site of our old house, severed by construction of Interstate 94. Foiled there, we also tried coming in from the north, from US 12, but the road had been cut off there, too, by road realignments in connection with port and steel mill construction. In 2001, at the national seashore visitor center, I pointed to the area we wanted to visit on a map and asked a ranger how to get there. “I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t go there.”

Laurie and I found the area (with no help from the Park Service) by entering an industrial park that never existed when I lived in Portage and following an unmarked gravel lane that brought us to a road which I quickly recognized as Samuelson Road. In fact, we had reached the road on a hill where a neighbor boy once poked a stick through the spokes of my tricycle and dumped me nose-first onto the pavement. We parked our van, and I set off to see if I could relocate the places that I loved so much when I was growing up. The contours of the road were familiar as I walked along it, but lanes that I remembered leading into woods or fields had vanished. Even the topography had changed! The sand pits and the hills where we sledded and played in the sand were completely gone. Evidently, sand had been mined there again. But, despite the alteration of the landscape, I located a pine tree that I remembered (walked right to it, practically), but then counted its tiers of branches and realized that the tree was too young to be anything but an offspring of trees that were there when I was a boy. From the pine tree, it was easy to find my way to familiar places along Salt Creek. The paths that we used to follow were gone, however, and I had to bushwhack through brambles and nettles in a woods of cottonwoods and ash. But the creek itself was as lovely as I remembered it. I stood on the roots of an old sycamore tree to photograph the bend where Bullhead Falls used to be and wondered if the tree remembered me.


SOURCES

Cockrell, Ron. A Signature of Time and Eternity. Omaha: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, 1988.

Engel, J. Ronald. Sacred Sands. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983.

Stegner, Wallace. Wolf Willow. New York: Viking, 1962.