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THE GEOLOGY UNDER EVERYTHING
They once flowed the other way: The strangest fact in this section is the oldest. The St. Joseph and the St. Marys have not always been Maumee water. Charles R. Dryer, writing the geology chapter of the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee River, laid it out from the ground itself: the streams of this region "were once tributaries of the Wabash, but at present the eastern four join the Maumee and turn back upon themselves, so that in a course of ten miles the waters of the St. Joseph suffer a change in direction of 160°." When glacial Lake Maumee — the swollen ancestor of Lake Erie ponded against the retreating ice — finally burst its Fort Wayne outlet, the escaping water cut a new eastward course and captured the headwaters that had been drifting toward the Wabash, bending them around to Toledo instead. Modern reference works state the same event in the modern vocabulary: the St. Joseph and St. Marys were "captured by river piracy."
The capture is why Fort Wayne is a divide town with a portage at all: the same low ground that let a lake escape eastward left the Maumee's headwaters and the Wabash's Little River separated by nothing but a marshy few miles and a few feet of elevation. The full geological telling — the lake, the outlet flood, the moraines — belongs to the Before Fort Wayne section. The point for the rivers themselves is simpler: their present arrangement is an accident of one Ice Age afternoon, and everything human in this record, from Kekionga to the canal to the consent decree, is downstream of it.
Sources:
- Charles R. Dryer, "Geology and Physical Geography," in Valley of the Upper Maumee River, Vol. I (1889) — the Wabash-Erie trough, the reversed streams, and the 160-degree turn of the St. Joseph.
- Maumee River reference record — the St. Joseph and St. Marys "captured by river piracy."
- the Before the City section of this history — the Lake Maumee outlet and the making of the divide, in full.