Boneyard Creek is a waterway that drains much of the cities of Champaign and Urbana, Illinois. It is a tributary of the Saline Branch of the Salt Fork Vermilion River, which is a tributary of the south-flowing Vermilion River and the Wabash River. The creek flows through the northern sections of the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The newsletter of the university's ACM chapter is Banks of the Boneyard, named after the creek. History In pre-settlement times, the Boneyard, like most of the other watercourses of Champaign County, Illinois, was probably a series of connected wetlands without a clearly defined channel. With settlement, the drainage was "improved". Today the Boneyard is a highly channelized stream, running in a slit trench, with steel sheet pilings along much of its length. There are several stories about the origin of the name "Boneyard". One is that the local Indians hung their dead over the stream, allowing the bones to fall into the creek, so that the creek was full of human bones when the first American settlers arrived. This could be an example of excarnation, which many Native American peoples indeed practiced. One problem with this story is that there have been no confirmed findings of human bones in excavations along the streams. In University of Illinois lore, the name "Boneyard" comes from the remains of poor students who could not handle the school's tough engineering curriculum. Another possible explanation is that the local Native Americans brought their "hunting kills" back to this area (communities would exist near local water sources) in order to clean and consume their food. The animal waste would likely have been located near the creek and bones would be the most likely waste to be found later. In the 1950s, Professor Karl B. Lohmann, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, and Urbana Parks Commissioner, publicly advocated improving the Boneyard Creek. Prior to the environmental movement in the late 1960s the Boneyard was an open sewer, with floating solids and a foul stench. During the 1970s many sources of pollution were removed, and water quality gradually improved. The Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District sewage outfall is located on the Saline Branch, just downstream from where the Boneyard enters that stream. Late in the 1970s, sewage chlorination, required by environmental regulations, was identified as a major negative factor for aquatic life. Although disinfection theoretically