The local Native Americans showed these early European explorers how to traverse waterways of the Des Plaines watershed to travel from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River and its valley.

The slow-moving Des Plaines River rises in southern Wisconsin just west of Kenosha adjacent to the Great Lakes Dragway and flows southward primarily through marshland, with a small eastbound kink before it crosses into Illinois.

Eventually, the river turns to the southwest and joins with the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Lockport before flowing through the city of Joliet.

(41°23′28″N 88°15′31″W / 41.390976°N 88.258724°W / 41.390976; -88.258724) Those parts of the Des Plaines River preserved in a mostly natural state are used for conservation and recreation, while substantially altered sections serve as an important industrial waterway and drainage channel.

The original course of the riverbed was moved to the west at the town of Lockport during the construction of the Sanitary and Ship Canal in 1905.

The word la plaine, in the 18th-century Mississippi Valley dialect of French spoken at the time, referred to either the American sycamore or the red maple, both of which resembled the European plane tree either in their palmate leaves or similar bark.

A side effect of such action was that the original French meaning of the name applied to the Des Plaines River was obscured.

Bull Creek in Libertyville, Illinois flows into the Des Plaines near Independence Grove Forest Preserve.

Southeast of Mount Prospect and due north of Des Plaines, Illinois, Weller Creek flows south into the DPR.

Half a mile east of O'Hare International Airport, Crystal Creek meanders its way into the Des Plaines.

Salt Creek of Hollywood, a neighborhood in Brookfield, Illinois, begins in Palatine and flows downstream into the river.

The Des Plaines and the Sanitary and Ship Canal finally merge on the edges of Crest Hill, Illinois.

The greatest recorded flood, in September 1986, caused an estimated $35 million in damage to 10,000 dwellings and 263 business and industrial sites.

[14] In the six months prior to his December 1978 arrest, serial killer John Wayne Gacy discarded the remains of at least four of his thirty-three known victims into the river, after finding no other suitable locations to dispose of them, due to the further twenty-nine known victims being buried in the crawlspace or other locations upon the grounds of his home.