Surveyors of the US General Land Office (GLO), surveyed the four townships of the Boone Creek Watershed in the summer of 1837.  While laying out the grid of townships and sections, the deputy surveyor and his crew crossed a landscape that most people can’t even imagine today.  In 1837, the area we now know as Boone Creek was indeed part of America’s western frontier.  Just one year prior, Native Americans were required by treaty to relocate west of the Mississippi.  It was the GLO surveyors’ job to subdivide the landscape for the new European-American settlers arriving from the east.  If only these surveyors were botanists as well accomplished surveyors!  What a wellspring of information they could have recorded for us.  Nonetheless, even though the word “ecology” didn’t even exist in 1837, the maps and descriptions left behind from these early surveyors provide modern-day ecologists an opportunity to reconstruct a picture of the past - a picture of something that in some ways still exists, but in other ways has been changed forever.

Back in 1837, just as today, the most outstanding feature of the watershed was the impressive valley of Boone Creek that is defined by abruptly rising glacial moraines. At several points, the surveyors described Boone Creek as being approximately 10 feet wide and having a rapid current.  Unlike many small streams

The bottomlands through which the creek flowed were described and mapped as wet-prairie.  While the term “wet-prairie” is today recognized by ecologists as a specific type of plant community - the surveyors in 1837 used this term to generalize conditions they encountered and the plant communities they found.  So, we know that the bottomlands along Boone Creek actually consisted of much more than just wet-prairie.  Rather, these bottomlands were a complex mosaic of sedge meadows, fen wetlands, wet-prairies, and marshes.   Flowing easterly towards the Fox River, Boone Creek meandered through a biologically rich wetland mosaic which was basically devoid of trees except for an occasional bur oak tree or willow thicket.  Together, these wetlands comprised 30 percent of the entire watershed in 1837.  At the time, the surveyors characterized these natural wetlands as “too wet and not fit for cultivation”.  However, that perspective would change with the advent of extensive farm drain tile systems installed in  the later half of the 19^th century.

Dry prairies were encountered on higher ground and on well drained soils.  The term “dry prairie” was used to differentiate prairies that were considered suitable for farming from those prairies that were too wet to be farmed.  As such, not all dry prairies were actually dry - just not so wet to preclude cultivation.  Extensive dry prairies consisting of mesic to dry prairie communities were encountered primarily along the eastern side of the watershed.  One can easily imagine prairie fires sweeping across the broad bottomland prairies and onto the adjacent upland prairies.  The flames would have been fanned by westerly winds and these conflagrations would quickly and violently burn across the level terrain of Boone Creek.  Without fire, these prairie systems would have been over-taken by trees in the centuries prior to European-American settlement.  These drier prairies comprised a little over ten percent of the entire watershed in 1837.