page_title: Chicago River
section_title: Course
hierarchical_section_title: Chicago River / Course
caption_attribution_description: English: The Chicago River as seen from the Lake Street Bridge.
context_page_description: The Chicago River is a system of rivers and canals with a combined length of 156 miles that runs through the city of Chicago, including its center. Though not especially long, the river is notable because it is one of the reasons for Chicago's geographic importance: the related Chicago Portage is a link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Basin, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.
  The River is also noteworthy for its natural and human-engineered history. In 1887, the Illinois General Assembly decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River through civil engineering by taking water from Lake Michigan and discharging it into the Mississippi River watershed, partly in response to concerns created by an extreme weather event in 1885 that threatened the city's water supply. In 1889, the Illinois General Assembly created the Chicago Sanitary District to replace the Illinois and Michigan Canal with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a much larger waterway, because the former had become inadequate to serve the city's increasing sewage and commercial navigation needs.
context_section_description: When it followed its natural course, the North and South Branches of the Chicago River converged at Wolf Point to form the Main Stem, which jogged southward from the present course of the river to avoid a baymouth bar, entering Lake Michigan at about the level of present-day Madison Street. Today, the Main Stem of the Chicago River flows west from Lake Michigan to Wolf Point, where it converges with the North Branch to form the South Branch, which flows southwest and empties into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
caption: A view of the Chicago River from the South Branch, looking toward the Main Stem (right) and the North Branch (upper left) at Wolf Point
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