In the early 1800s, Turkey Creek was part of
French Bottoms, settled by rows of narrow strips of farms owned by French-speaking pioneering settlers of French-Canadian and tribal mixed culture. In 1823,
pioneering American surveyor Joseph C. Brown documented the creek's mouth at the
Missouri River, about east of
Kaw Point, with a watershed west of the
Missouri state line and about into the
Indian Territory. Later, at the all-time record
Great Flood of 1844, Turkey Creek relocated its mouth from the Missouri River westward to the Kansas River and erased all human settlement of the French Bottoms. The stream has always threatened the area with countless floods through history, sometimes being flooded by the Kansas River Several floods in the early 1900s prompted a 1918-1920 engineering project creating a flood channel to the Kansas River by boring a 28 by 32 foot wide and long tunnel through the bluff called Greystone Heights. causing more than in damage. Affected localities include the
Merriam, Kansas drainage district, receiving over in federal
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding in 2022, where one municipal objective is to eliminate the need for downtown businesses to buy flood insurance. The , multi-decade, Kansas City Levee Project is complemented by the Turkey Creek Flood Damage Reduction Project. The key was reportedly to open the channel from 45 feet wide to wide for . ==See also==