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The Great Kankakee, the lake, the capture at the bend — and the two streams that are this ground's own
One valley, two watersheds: The master fact of the valley, in Montgomery's sentence as the county history prints it: from the geological formations from Lake Huron and Saginaw Bay, following the valleys of the St. Joseph and the Kankakee, "those two great valleys were originally one; and that, at a remote period, the waters of Saginaw Bay flowed through southwestern Michigan and northwestern Indiana, reaching the Mississippi by way of the Illinois River." The broad flood plain of that river — Montgomery's Great Kankakee — "may still be traced over the whole region from Saginaw Bay to the Mississippi, passing through the heart of St. Joseph county." His measures for the ancient waterway where South Bend now lies: "a wonderful river once flowed, a stream three miles wide and one hundred feet or more in depth, moving from east to west"; to the northeast, a flood "from five to six miles in width… passing at his feet and rolling onward to the southwest, confined only by the hills on the north and on the south." Those northern hills are this section's ground. The flood plain below varies "from three miles at its narrowest point, which is one mile below South Bend, to about twenty at its broadest," with its southeasterly bank "from fifty to one hundred feet high"; five miles east of South Bend, at Mishawaka's reach, the valley is six miles wide of level sand plain. The river that made the valley flowed southwest, to the Gulf; the upland this section covers was its northern wall.
The rock that ponded it, and the lake: Beyond the present Illinois line the ancient stream "crossed the arched bed rock which extends in a northwesterly course across Indiana into Illinois. Near the present site of Momence, Illinois, this rocky ridge produced a well marked rapids… which tended to dam the waters and cause them to overflow a wide territory above." The geological literature after Montgomery gives the ponding a lake's name and dates: glacial Lake Kankakee, in existence by about 14,000 years ago, its northern waters stretched, in Edward Barrett's 1916 report for the state geological survey, "to the marshes southwest of South Bend"; about 13,000 years ago it drained down to the level of the Momence limestone ledge and, unable to cut through it, shallowed into the Grand Kankakee Marsh — carried in the literature at 400,000 acres in the Fraser and Bleuer framework (1991) and 500,000 acres in the standard lake-history accounting, both printed. Behind the lake stands the flood that scoured the valley: the Kankakee Torrent, named in Leverett's United States Geological Survey Monograph 38 (1899) and dated by the modern study of the deglaciation floods (Curry, Hajic, Clark and others, 2014) to about 19,000 years ago.
Capture at the bend: The present river exists because a tributary stole a trunk stream. In Montgomery's account, the glacial Dowagiac, which had entered the great Kankakee at the site of South Bend from the north, itself reversed: at a point just below Niles it "doubled upon itself at an angle of forty-five degrees, followed the abandoned channel of its former tributary and discharged its waters into Lake Michigan." The arithmetic decided the rest: "The distance from South Bend… to St. Joseph, Michigan, is thirty-eight miles, with a fall of one hundred and forty-one feet. From South Bend to Momence, Illinois, the distance is ninety-two miles with a fall of ninety-three feet" — the fall by the new route three and a half times greater. The first annual floods split at the bend; the new channel cut rapidly through the old river deposits, "finally taking all the waters of the once mighty Kankakee"; a sandbar thrown diagonally across the old channel at South Bend — built of sediment from Wenger Creek, twelve to fourteen feet high, the ridge the settlers knew as the Bluff — "sealed forever" the Kankakee valley. An ice gorge at Crum's Point, seven miles below South Bend, aided the turn. Since the capture, "the new river has eroded its valleys from fifty to sixty feet into the old river deposits, but has not yet reached their base level." The modern basin study (Kincare, Western Michigan University dissertation, 2010, carried here at the strength of its published abstract) restates the sequence as profile geometry — a basin of some 11,137 square kilometres, the river 316 kilometres with its head 158.8 metres above Lake Michigan, "sequentially constructed from the distal areas to the proximal areas": "Early deglacial drainage was initially south toward the Wabash River and later west to the Kankakee River before attaining its final configuration draining to Lake Michigan" — and moves the date: "The St. Joseph River did not drain into the Lake Michigan basin until the Calumet phase of glacial Lake Chicago, 1500 years after previously thought." The phase names carry the lake's current dating frame (Curry, Bruegger & Conroy, Geology, 2018): glacial Lake Chicago's Glenwood highstand about 17,000 to 15,000 calibrated years ago, its Calumet highstand about 14,000 to 12,400. The upper river that feeds the bend was itself a meltwater work: the "St. Joseph sluiceway" of a Western Michigan University study (Erber, 2016), the modern channel in south-central Michigan, carried meltwater from the Huron-Erie lobe — Michigan ground, the headwater reach of the same river, printed at that boundary.
This ground's own water: None of that water crosses this ground; the upland sheds its own. Its named stream is Juday Creek: a groundwater-fed tributary of the St. Joseph, twelve miles long in the Tribune's accounting (nineteen kilometres in the Notre Dame studies), one of the few streams in Indiana that can support a naturally reproducing brown trout population, gauged by the United States Geological Survey (gage 04101370) near its mouth. It begins, in the words of the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative's account, in farm fields in Granger, and "meanders west across the Grape Road corridor, Warren Golf Course near the University of Notre Dame and through some South Bend neighborhoods before connecting with the St. Joseph River" at the Izaak Walton League property. Its watershed is carried at 14,700 acres in that account and at about 98 square kilometres in the stream-restoration literature (Shirey and others, 2016) — the two figures stand as their sources give them. Legally the creek is an open drain under the county Drainage Board, whatever its trout say. Its name has a recorded spelling history and an unrecorded origin: the creek was Judy before it was Juday — the name changed near the Notre Dame campus about 1910, in the Juday Creek studies of Notre Dame's Ron Hellenthal, who has researched the stream since 1977 — and the federal gauge record still carries the older form, "Judy Creek." For whom or what the creek was first named, no source reached says: the naming stands as a named gap of this section, and the note that accompanies this section names the records that would settle it. The township's second stream survives in one passage of Howard's Harris sketch: "There is, however, no river in or near Harris… but a sluggish stream, known as Sheffield creek farther down, formerly led through the marsh land to the St. Joseph river. This stream has been converted into a great state ditch; and the lowlands have become nearly as valuable as the uplands of Harris prairie." The two streams are the whole of this ground's running water: the creek that kept its name and lost its spelling's history, and the creek that lost its course to a ditch and kept only its name, in one historian's sentence.
Sources: Howard (1907), Chapter I, §§II and VII — Montgomery's one-valley conclusion, the channel measures and the northern hills, the Momence arched bedrock, the Dowagiac reversal, the two falls and the three-and-a-half ratio, Crum's Point, the Bluff sandbar and the fifty-to-sixty-foot incision; Barrett, 41st Annual Report, Indiana Department of Geology and Natural Resources (1916) — Lake Kankakee's northern waters, as carried in the South Bend leg of this project; Fraser & Bleuer (1991) and the standard lake-history accounting — the marsh acreage range and the lake's draining at the Momence ledge, as carried in the South Bend leg; Leverett, USGS Monograph 38 (1899), and Curry, Hajic, Clark et al. (2014) — the torrent's naming and modern date; Kincare, "The late Wisconsin and Holocene development of the St. Joseph River drainage basin" (WMU dissertation, 2010), abstract — basin figures, drainage order and the Calumet-phase finding; Curry, Bruegger & Conroy, "Highstands and overflow history of glacial Lake Chicago…," Geology 46 (2018) — the Glenwood and Calumet frame; Erber (WMU master's thesis, 2016) — the St. Joseph sluiceway; University of Notre Dame, Environmental Change Initiative, "Juday Creek significant in the lives of many" (South Bend Tribune, 2013) — the creek's course, length, watershed and drain status; Shirey and others (2016), as indexed in the stream-restoration literature — the 19-kilometre length and 98-square-kilometre drainage; Ron Hellenthal, "Studies on Juday Creek 1978–," St. Joseph River Basin symposium presentation (2019) — the Judy-to-Juday change about 1910; United States Geological Survey, gage 04101370 and the National Weather Service gauge record ("Judy Creek") — the surviving older spelling; Howard (1907), Chapter V, §3 — Sheffield Creek and the Harris lowland.