Kickapoo is an Algonquian word meaning "one who goes here, then there", a fitting name as the river is very crooked, frequently doubling back on itself as it flows through the Wisconsin landscape.

The Kickapoo, the longest tributary of the Wisconsin River, drains over 800 square miles (2,100 km2) of land in Monroe, Vernon, Richland, and Crawford counties.

Trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator) and Canada geese (Branta canadensis) often depend on beaver lodges as nesting sites.

[8][9] As trees are drowned by rising beaver impoundments they become ideal nesting sites for obligate cavity nesters such as wood ducks (Aix sponsa), goldeneyes (Bucephala spp.

In the late 1960s, the frequent floods prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin a dam project on the Kickapoo River near La Farge, Wisconsin.

In preparation for the construction, the government used eminent domain to buy 149 farms comprising 8,569 acres (35 km2) of land from mostly unwilling sellers.

The halting of the project also doomed the 1983 attempt by local residents to get government support for a smaller flood control dry dam.

[14] The 8,569 acres (35 km2) of land bought by the government remained in the possession of the Corps of Engineers until 1996, when it was split and parts were given to the state of Wisconsin and the Ho-Chunk Native American Tribe.

Today, an increasing number and intensity of extreme weather events is sometimes exceeding the design capacity of flood control structures.

In the mid-1970s, Soldiers Grove residents decided on an alternative to the Corps of Engineers' plan to build a levee around the village and undertook the relocation of the community's central business district to higher ground.

The relocation was completed several years later, with the business district rebuilt out of reach flooding and heated largely with passive solar systems.