Salt Creek is a 43.4-mile-long (69.8 km) stream in northeastern Illinois. It is an important tributary of the Des Plaines River, part of the Illinois River and ultimately the Mississippi River watersheds. It rises in northwest Cook County at Wilke Marsh in Palatine and flows in a meandering course generally southward through DuPage County, returning to central Cook County and emptying into the Des Plaines River near Brookfield. Most of the creek's watershed is urbanized, densely populated and flood-prone.
Dams were constructed along the creek in 1978 within the Ned Brown Forest Preserve near Elk Grove Village, Illinois, creating the 590-acre (2.4 km2) Busse Lake. A diversion tunnel was constructed approximately 1.6 miles (2.6 km) north of the confluence with the Des Plaines River, at a point where the two streams are separated by only 1,600 feet (490 m).
Tributary streams include Addison Creek. The Graue Mill historic gristmill stands on the bank of the creek in Oak Brook.
Famous quotes containing the words salt, creek and/or river:
“Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ... and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)