The Kissimmee Saga: New Hope for the Everglades Headwaters By Doug Alderson
The Kissimmee Saga: New Hope for the Everglades Headwaters
By Doug Alderson
Paddling hand-hewn dugout canoes, Seminole Indians once cruised the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes and Kissimmee River. They camped on unspoiled islands and shorelines, encountered numerous alligators, and reveled in soaring bald eagles, ospreys and snail kites. It’s not surprising that even after these early inhabitants were repeatedly driven deep into the southern Everglades during successive wars in the nineteenth century, small bands returned to this region and forged friendships with many of the early pioneers and ranchers who had settled the area.
In the late 1800s, steamboats churned up and down the Kissimmee River’s twisting channel. “There is no more pleasant way of spending a week than to take the trip to Basinger,” wrote an anonymous reporter for The Kissimmee Valley Gazette in 1899, referring to a steamboat run along the river. “Birds of all kinds are in sight the whole way; flocks of ducks, coots, herons, cranes, limpkins, curlews, plume birds and water turkeys without end. Also alligators, rabbits and water snakes and plenty of fish, too.”
Boat operators often cursed the Kissimmee’s “bewildering crookedness,” but when water covered its marshy floodplain, navigation was equally confusing. In 1882, Archie P. Williams, as part of an expedition that promoted canals and dredging throughout the system, found themselves sailing on a flooded Kissimmee. Despair was setting in as light faded. “We look in vain for some friendly clump of trees in the distance, under which we may pitch our tents for the night,” he wrote. “Nothing meets the eyes but sky, marsh and water, without a foot of dry land in sight.”
Long-term flooding made the Kissimmee unique among most North American rivers. In some years, the wide floodplain was inundated for twelve consecutive months, or longer. “Flooding was the driver behind the Kissimmee’s high biological productivity,” said Joe Koebel, senior environmental scientist for the South Florida Water Management District. “Long-term inundation of the floodplain provided aquatic invertebrates, fishes, and other wildlife with excellent habitat for feeding, growing, and reproducing. These food resources were then available to larger predators such as largemouth bass, wading birds, waterfowl, and numerous birds of prey.”
But the same flooding that brought biological prosperity and beauty to the river led to its demise. After World War II, larger numbers of people moved into the Kissimmee Basin, especially along the chain of lakes above the river. When growing towns such as Kissimmee became flooded for weeks after large storms, the Kissimmee River was blamed since water moved so slowly through its wide floodplain, backing up water in the chain of lakes.
Enter the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
From 1962 through 1971, the Army Corps of Engineers cut a straight ditch through the river’s heart—reducing its length by half--to speed the flow of water to Lake Okeechobee. More than 35,000 acres of wetlands dried up. As a result, fish, waterfowl and other wildlife drastically declined. Water was no longer being filtered by a slow meandering river channel through its expansive marshlands--kidneys for any natural system. Lake Okeechobee received too much water too quickly during the rainy season, forcing the South Florida Water Management District to dump excess water through canals to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Atlantic Ocean. And because the water quality was often severely degraded, Lake Okeechobee and estuaries on both coasts began to suffer from harmful algae blooms.
Meanwhile, due to the Kissimmee canalization and other major changes in the system, the Everglades below the big lake did not receive the normal amount of water during the dry season, and the entire system was thrown out of kilter. Fish and wildlife suffered from this biological domino effect. Even the upper chain of lakes was affected since water was no longer being backed up in the system by a slow-moving river. Boaters complained they were running aground in some of the lakes—formerly a rare occurrence.
Even before the last floating suction dredges and draglines had left the Kissimmee River, conservationists were calling for restoration. They were often at odds with cattle ranchers who were expanding their improved and unimproved pastures into Kissimmee’s former floodplain.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the Everglades’ most famous and eloquent spokesperson, was in the thick of the Kissimmee battles. Her book The Everglades: River of Grass in 1947 was a work that all other Everglades books are measured against, but she was much more than a writer. Late in her life, she defined the word “environmental activist.”
When I lobbied for environmental causes in the late 1970s and early 80s, I often observed Douglas testify at Florida government hearings in Tallahassee. She was over ninety years old then and still sharp. Her words were eloquent, her voice sometimes scolding, and she wouldn’t compromise her goal of restoring the entire Everglades system.
Douglas had teamed up with noted scientist Dr. Arthur R. Marshall. Between the two of them, they bemoaned the loss of the Kissimmee River, how a natural winding waterway had been converted into a 52-mile pollution-filled ditch, draining more and more water off the historic floodplains. “Wasteful and stupid beyond words,” summarized Douglas, never one to mince words. Other activists included the late Johnny Jones of the Florida Wildlife Federation and my friend Richard Coleman of the Sierra Club, both of whom were hunters and fishermen who could rally sportsmen to the cause. A wildlife and environmental area was later named after Jones and his spouse and a boat landing on Lake Kissimmee after Coleman, who died in an airboat accident.
By the late 1980s, the Everglades and Kissimmee River became everyone’s sweetheart, and few politicians publicly opposed restoration. Bob Graham, who first served as Florida’s governor and then United States senator, championed the Kissimmee cause. In 1990, he inserted language into a public works bill that authorized the Corps to take on purely environmental projects. Two years later, Congress directed the Corps to restore the Kissimmee River, and environmental projects are now a regular part of the Corps’ workload.
The Kissimmee restoration plan included backfilling part of the canal, removing two dams, and restoring flow to the middle section of the old Kissimmee River channel and floodplain. Control structures would remain at the top and bottom of the river to control flooding.
After years of study, environmental history turned a new page in 1999. Engineers along the Kissimmee were once again turning dirt, this time to help remediate past wrongs. More than seven miles of the C-38 Canal were backfilled, water was diverted into the old river channel, and long dormant wetlands began sprouting back to life.
A key dam on the river was blown up. Sequential photographs of the destruction were featured on the Army Corps of Engineers website with apparent pride. Blow up a dam for conservation? It was enough to make any battle-scarred conservationist flush with pride. I can picture Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Art Marshall and other Kissimmee activists who have gone to the great river beyond perched atop a cypress tree to view the explosion, with the ever-optimistic Marshall concluding, “Well Marjory, I knew we could do it.” And the feisty Douglas responding, scrunching up her nose, “It’s about damn time!”
In 2006, another milestone was reached; the South Florida Water Management District had acquired enough land along the river to complete the restoration, but it would take another 15 years to restore a total of 44 miles of winding river and 40,000 acres of wetlands. In the process, another dam met a glorious end. Now complete, it is considered the largest true ecosystem restoration project in the world, attracting ecologists from around the world who seek to resurrect their maligned rivers.
Today, paddlers and boaters are able to view the restoration first-hand. Long-buried sandbars have reemerged. Dry-land trees that had encroached into the floodplain are dying back. Once dormant native plants such as pink-tipped smartweed, the jointed stems of horsetail, and various sedges and rushes have popped up along the shores. Vast stretches of soggy broadleaf marsh now thrive in what were once dry cow pastures, bahia grass replaced by leathery green arrowhead plants, white-flowered duck potato, and purple-topped pickerel weed. The native seeds had been embedded in the soil since before canalization, waiting for sunlight and a surge of freshwater to bring them to life.
Once the reemerging wetlands began filtering excess nutrients from the water, the flushing of the channel and turbulent mixing from the restored flow led to a dramatic increase in dissolved oxygen levels in the river. The result was a biological boon. While scientists attested to a rapid rise in aquatic invertebrates in the river channel such as filtering caddisflies and larval midges that small fish thrive on, anglers raved about improved fisheries. Catches of bass and bream are now reminiscent of the old Kissimmee. Plus, numbers of alligators, waterfowl and wading birds have risen exponentially, including large numbers of endangered Everglade snail kites.
The restored river corridor is also beneficial to larger animals such as Florida panthers and black bears which need interconnected wild lands to live and thrive. Plus, the restored floodplain stores more water for a longer period during the wet season, helping to sustain the ecosystem during the dry season while filtering pollutants and extra nitrogen.
In places, the Kissimmee flows through a marshy floodplain nearly two miles wide, resembling a waterway through the Everglades River of Grass. After all, this is the heart of the Everglades Headwaters. And although much of the water flow is still managed, the river system again pulses with the natural cycles of flooding and dry periods, harboring an incredible abundance of life.
To Learn More…
With restoration complete and several new primitive campsites established by the South Florida Management District with assistance from volunteers with the Florida Paddling Trails Association, the Florida Office of Greenways and Trails is currently working with the District to designate the Kissimmee River a state paddling trail. Plus, the National Park Service is now studying the restored section of river for possible inclusion in the national Wild and Scenic River program. More information about paddling the river can be found on the Florida Paddling Trails Association website: https://www.floridapaddlingtrails.com/paddling-trails/peace/kissimmee.
Information about the Kissimmee River restoration can be found on the Riverwoods Field Lab website: https://www.ces.fau.edu/riverwoods/, and the South Florida Water Management District website: https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/kissimmee-river.
Doug Alderson is the author of several books about the Florida outdoors, environment and history. His book New Dawn for the Kissimmee: Orlando to Lake Okeechobee by Kayak was published in 2009 by the University Press of Florida and will be out in paperback in 2025. To learn more, log onto www.dougalderson.net.