What about the Chicago River...?
Answer:
Chicago, river, formed in Chicago by the junction of its North Branch (24 mi long) and South Branch (10 mi long), and flowing southeast via a canal into the Des Plaines River at Lockport, Ill. The river formerly flowed east, then northeast via a channel, into Lake Michigan. Its course was reversed by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, 30 mi long, 22 ft deep, and from 162 to 290 ft wide, built (1892–1900) on the South Branch to prevent the pollution of Lake Michigan by Chicago's sewage; locks prevent the river from entering the lake. The use of Lake Michigan's water to flush the canal was a heated political issue finally settled in 1930 when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a reduction in the amount of water being diverted from the lake. This decision forced Chicago to build sewage treatment plants. The channels of the Chicago River and the North Branch have been improved to aid deep-draft vessels and barges.
Originally, the river flowed into Lake Michigan. As Chicago grew this allowed sewage and other pollution into the clean-water source for the city. This contributed to several public health issues including some problems with typhoid. Starting in the 1850s much of the flow was diverted across the Chicago Portage into the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago, then headed by Rudolph Hering, completely reversed the flow of the river using a series of canal locks and caused the river to flow into the newly completed Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Before this time the Chicago River was known by many local residents of Chicago as "the stinking river" because of the massive amounts of sewage and pollution which poured into the river from Chicago's booming industrial economy. Up through the 1980s, the river was quite dirty and often filled with garbage; however, during the 1990s, it underwent extensive cleaning as part of an effort at beautification by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Recently, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created a three-dimensional, hydrodynamic simulation of the Chicago River, which suggested that density currents are the cause of an observed bi-directional wintertime flow in the river. At the surface, the river flows east to west, away from Lake Michigan, as expected. But deep below, near the riverbed, water travels west to east, toward the lake.
All outflows from the Great Lakes basin are regulated by a joint U.S.-Canadian commission and the outflow through the Chicago River is set under a U.S. Supreme Court decision (1967, modified 1980 and 1997). The city of Chicago is allowed to remove 3200 cubic feet per second (91 m³/s) of water from the Great Lakes system; about half of this, 1 billion US gallons a day (44 m³/s), is sent down the Chicago River, while the rest is used for drinking water. In late 2005 the Alliance for the Great Lakes proposed separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins.
yep cause the river was polluted and the city needed fresh water. it came from lake michigan after they changed the course of the river.
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