Driving on any of the main north-south roads in this area, one is certain to cross the milky channel of the diverted Cahokia Creek. Originally wending its way through the bulk of the floodplain—feeding Horseshoe Lake and various other lakes in the flood plain on its way to the Mississippi River—the Old Cahokia Creek Watershed is a 1,300-acre area feeding and draining the entire mid-portion of the American Bottom. The original Cahokia Creek channel entered the floodplain just north of the SIUE campus and wended its way south along the Wood River Terrace at a slope of approximately 1.5 feet per mile. The Creek formerly flowed into the Eastern corner of Horseshoe Lake, which served as a vast reservoir to capture local discharge. Flowing out of the Southwestern branch of the Lake, the south branch of the creek has now been channelized as well—with the Cahokia Canal Pump Station designed to discharge the canal back into the Mississippi River. While the majority of the original Creek has been diverted into engineered channels, traces of the creek are still visible throughout the bottomlands—as saturated scars in agricultural fields, forested lowlands, wetlands, or backwater sloughs. /// The primary flow of what is now a severely ecologically impaired regional waterway is channelized in what the Army Corps calls the Cahokia Diversion Channel, as the channel picks up the Creek at the place where it first enters the floodplain at the bluff. The two levees that parallel the channel and keep its water contained during heavy local rains are instructive to the working of the complex network of flood-prevention infrastructure in the region. The levee to the north of the channel is in fact the southern stretch of the Wood River levee protection district; while that to the south of the channel is in fact the northern stretch of the Metro East levee district. These respective levees begin at the bluff, paralleling each other through the bottomlands, then diverge as they track the riverfront north and south—only to return back to the bluff at a later point. This channel, then, can be seen as the space between two basins—itself connected to the river and allowed to flood during high-water seasons.