The Forest grew quiet as the snows without end slowly buried the land. This was the first of many years when summer would not come. As the land became ever more frigid the last pockets of native life either found escape to the south or died.

But the land did not remain still. The world-rearranging force of a glacier began to flow south from the Hudson Bay. As the snows to the north fell year after year without melting, the accumulating effect was to build up a continental sheet of ice. This glacier, known to history as Wisconsin, ground down and pulverized everything in its path.

The forces located where the ice meets earth are tremendous. At heights of over a mile, the accumulating, crushing weight of Wisconsin forged her own means of passage. As the northern ice piled ever higher, Wisconsin's base began to squish out under the force of gravity, while simultaneously the tremendous pressures melted the lowest reaches of ice. As she flowed south, Wisconsin bulldozed the materials at her advancing edge binding them up into her flows. Much of those materials having been picked up and carried in ancestral glaciers were now reanimated by Wisconsin as she ground down to the very bedrock. The gouges on ancient granite that marked her passing can be seen today on areas of exposed bedrock to the north of Lake Superior and on ancient seabeds to our east.

But Wisconsin would not dominate the landscape forever. As summers began to warm, the advance of Wisconsin was halted, beginning a series of retreats and forward skirmishes. When her western ice lobe had retreated to the Steuben County area, Wisconsin tarried on the land with her skirt arranged roughly along the Indiana-Michigan boundary. At this edge, the warming temperatures melted Wisconsin as fast as her new ice from the north could advance. At this static edge Wisconsin melted and released from her ice the burden of sands, gravel, clays and the occasional boulder of bedrock she had brought from lands far to the north. As the ice in Wisconsin flowed south only to melt along this temporary border, a long ridge of materials was laid down at the skirmish line where Wisconsin and Sun waged their battle for dominance. This ridge, or moraine, would form the south boundary of the Fawn River valley.

Wisconsin was destined to lose her see-saw battle. Her retreating melt was inevitable in the warming of renewed summers. Wisconsin made a fast run north where she laid down only what she held and had little time to arrange her works. This resulted in the north facing slope of the now abandoned south moraine being more erratically hilly and presenting coarse deposits laid down randomly, much as they had been carried in the ice of Wisconsin. Those that farm in this area of Steuben County can attest to soil and topography that are less that ideal for agriculture, suggesting other reasons for settlement here.

In her hasty melt north, Wisconsin was forced to abandon substantial portions of herself as large blocks of ice in various sizes and shapes broke off from her south edge. These mountain-sized chunks of ice (icebergs if broken off over the sea) were left scattered throughout what would become the Fawn River valley. The ice chunks loomed large--with perhaps their caps shrouded in mist--their bases buried deep in the materials Wisconsin was leaving behind. The water continued to pour from the flanks of these massive chunks abandoned to the summer sun. Water-filled cavities marked their passing. The legacy of their brief regency and a memorial to Wisconsin's one time rule are the lakes imprinted on the landscape of Steuben County.

Briefly, temperatures cooled. Wisconsin halted in her melt north to wage battle at still another line of retreat. Her lead edge again seemed to remain in place while Wisconsin's conveyer belt of flowing ice melting at the line was dumping her burden in yet another long ridge of materials. This moraine became the north edge of the Fawn River valley. As this northern moraine was being formed, the melting edge waters of Wisconsin continued to pour down its face. The drainage area from the escarpments of Wisconsin's melting mountains of ice generated a polishing sheet of water that smoothed and sorted the dumped materials such that nearly flat plains and large expanses of fine sand, silt and clays were laid down in portions of the Fawn River valley.

The meltwaters from Wisconsin and the abandoned "icebergs" flowed eventually to the lowest point between the South Moraine and the North Moraine. The power of those currents washed and sorted the channel material of the newly born Fawn River, leaving a bottom of mostly gravel and sand. The primordial waters of the Fawn River eventually connected to the subsequently formed and larger river, the Saakiiwee Siipiiwi (the St. Joseph River in Michigan) which emptied into Lake Chicago (nascent Lake Michigan). Those waters, with which the flow from Fawn River was mingled, coursed through the outlet of Lake Chicago into the Illinois River to the Mississippi, and were eventually released into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was at this time that aquatic life began to make its way into the infant Fawn from the connections being made with the established southern waterways.

The connection south was eventually closed off by large deposits of glacial materials (a moraine) left at the Chicago shoreline damming the outlet to the Illinois River. Consequently, the Lake Michigan system, of which Fawn is a part, now flows mainly north to the straits of Mackinaw, then south through Huron, east through the lower Great Lakes, then over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence into the Atlantic Ocean.

Today the Fawn River rises from marshlands within Michigan a few miles to the northeast of Fremont Indiana. From there the Fawn works its way through several large lakes in Michigan and Indiana until it reaches the "official" headwaters at the small town of Nevada Mills, Indiana. The Fawn, more creek than river for the first twenty miles and best described by its settlement name of Crooked Creek, flows through gently rolling forested hills, farmlands and swamps. From Nevada Mills to Orland, in the past the Fawn was dredged in large sections destroying the once natural gravel watercourse and thus crippling these sections in their ability to support much of the native aquatic life. However, beginning at Orland, Fawn River remained in its nearly original condition for about four miles.

At Orland below the IDNR hatchery, the river bottom was typically washed gravel with some areas of blonde sand. Large and varied game fish, silhouetted against the bright pebbly bottom, could be seen through the sparkling clear waters The purity of the waters and the clean gravel bottom made it perhaps the best remaining natural river fishery in Indiana with common catches of such prized fish as northern pike and large mouth, small mouth and rock bass. Along with crayfish and snails, rare and endangered clam species (actually mussels) also sheltered from extinction in this stretch of Fawn's clean waters. By comparison, many rivers in Indiana are too degraded to support self-sustaining fisheries and must be regularly stocked.

A variety of upland wildlife, some rare, was also found in the Fawn River ecosystem. Kingfishers, migrating osprey, eagles, ducks, geese, Sand Hill cranes, great blue herons and white herons, beaver, otters, muskrats, turtles and water snakes are among the wildlife sighted that depended upon this healthy river.

This section of Fawn was famous in Indiana among canoers and kayakers for the rugged beauty of its course. It has been called "Indiana's Answer to Canada" and a "wild river in miniature." The upland portions remain mostly forested with, at times, high banks that made you feel as if you were being squeezed through the neck of a bottle when a swift spring current carried your canoe forward. In this stretch of the Fawn it was possible to travel back in time to a place where Indiana rivers still ran clear and pure.

While the beauty of Fawn River's pristine habitat is difficult to describe, it was there to be experienced. It was a place where many had felt in awe of a creation which man could not repeat. It was a place where man's only power was that of a perverse child ripping petals from a beautiful flower.

This stretch of Fawn River was simply one of the very last places in Indiana where a pristine river environment and its rare web of life could be experienced. No more.

Fawn River was destroyed on May 18, 1998 when the Indiana Department of Natural Resources discharged 100,000 cubic yards of mud into the section of the stream beginning at Orland, Indiana. IDNR employees stood and watched the destruction from the top rails on the IDNR dam while the once clear waters ran black with the IDNR dredged mud that would bury Fawn River's bright gravel bottom, destroy its pristine habitat and extinguish much of its rare aquatic life.

As with many of Indiana's rivers, the Fawn River is now a place of ugliness and death. So it will remain until the State of Indiana accepts the financial responsibility for restoration of that which it had no right to destroy.

We ask that you take the time to spread the word to friends and family. And even better, please write directly to Governor Frank O'Bannon and IDNR Director Larry Macklin and express your disappointment, or write to them indirectly through letters to the editor at any of the major regional papers or your home town newspaper. Or write your local state representatives. Check the activism page for addresses and other ideas. Your voice will make a difference.