Boneyard Creek is a 3.3mi 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 at Urbana-Champaign. The newsletter of the university's ACM chapter is Banks of the Boneyard, named after the creek.HistoryIn 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 couldn't hack it in the school's tough engineering curriculum.
