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1679–1911 · the St. Joseph reach this ground faces — South Bend and Mishawaka, boundary size
The working-river record is Otto M. Knoblock's "Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River" (Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. 8 No. 4, 1925), read whole. The river was a freight road before it was anything else. The St. Joseph–Kankakee portage, passable at all times of year over solid high ground, tied the lake river to the Kankakee and so to the Illinois country; in 1679 La Salle, with thirty men including Hennepin and Tonty, passed up the river from Lake Michigan to the head of the portage — the first white man, in Knoblock's telling, to transport merchandise on the river. Trading posts stood at the mouth (now St. Joseph, Michigan) and at Niles, and canoe and fur traffic was brisk as early as 1700. But no organised freight attempt followed for more than a century: from 1700 to 1831 the river carried canoes and trade, not a boat trade.
Keelboats. The boat trade begins in 1831, when Peter Johnson, a South Bend carpenter, built the first keel boat, the Fairplay — 40 feet long, 6 feet wide, made by splitting and lengthening a pirogue bought from a French trader at Niles, built in a shipyard at the foot of Washington Street, captained on her first trip by Johnson himself and then by Madore Cratee with a crew of four. In 1832 Johnson built the first real large-capacity keel boat, the Antelope: an 80-foot keel, 2-inch oak planks, built in Washington Street in front of his shop at 116 W. Washington and dragged some 1,000 feet across a corduroy road of willow trees laid over the swamp to the river — the launching was the first attempt to grade what is now East Washington Street, and Madore Cratee broke a bottle over her bow. The Comet followed the same year, built near the water-works reservoir site. From 1833 to 1840 Captain Boyd of Mishawaka built four or five smaller keel boats known as "Red Dogs," known by number, not by name. By 1833 the fleet between Three Rivers and the lake stood at ten or eleven keel boats, some 80 feet by 7, carrying 350 barrels of flour. Knoblock names twenty-five regular boats of the keelboat era, 1831 until the type was discontinued: Fairplay, Antelope, Comet, White Pigeon, Mason, Ottawa, Three Brothers, Swallow, Red Bird, Odd Fellow, Buena Vista, Rover, Racer, Dolphin, Diamond, Empire, Gem, Ruby, Goshen, Cass, and South Bend (Boyd's numbered Red Dogs excluded). The work was poling: crews of seven to nine, a captain as steersman and six to eight polers, and the up-trip was the killer. In 1832 alone, 10,000 barrels of merchandise were landed at the mouth — then called Newburyport, now St. Joseph — for shipment up-river. One keel boat, Lyman A. Barnard's of Niles (1832, 15 tons), was rigged with mast and sails and made several trips across the lake to Chicago. The era has a death in it: in 1859 a Boyd Red Dog passed into the head of the west race near the South Bend dam, struck a hawser stretched across below the head gates, and the steersman Trimble's back was broken; he died immediately.
Steamboats. Steam came in 1832 with the Newburyport, Captain White, which ran as far up as Berrien Springs, ran aground, and was brought back damaged; the idea was abandoned that year. In 1833 Deacon and McCaleb of St. Joseph built the Matilda Barney, a flat-bottomed stern-wheeler — ship carpenter Joseph Fisbay, engine by P. B. Andrews, Captain David Wilson, engineer Leveret Plum — which reached South Bend in early summer 1833 to a welcome, ran her nose onto the sand at the foot of Washington Street, and settled into regular trips well loaded with merchandise and towing two to five keel boats. In 1834 the Davy Crockett, brought up the lake from Presque Isle, ran in competition with her; the rivalry produced a poem by Nathan Young of Berrien Springs (1834), and when the Matilda ran on a snag and broke her wheel, she was towed to St. Joseph lashed alongside the Crockett. The full freight-steamcraft roll from 1832 to Knoblock's "present time" (1925) runs: Newburyport, Matilda Barney, Davy Crockett, Pocahontas, Algona, Indiana, Mishawaka, John F. Porter, Michigan, Niles, Niles Jr., St. Joseph, Union City, Pilot, Magnolia, King Brothers, Kakota, Schuyler Colfax, May Graham, Constantino, Albany, Diamond, and Kalamazoo. After the South Bend lock closed, four pleasure steamboats were built at South Bend for the South Bend–Mishawaka passenger trade and its "moonlight" excursions: the Condon, the J. C. Knoblock (later renamed Vandalia, built 1882, capacity 800–1,000 passengers, run several seasons over the four-mile stretch), the Ben Hamilton, and the Tourist. The last freight and passenger river boat was the May Graham, St. Joseph to Berrien Springs — Captain Fikes, whose wife served dinner aboard — withdrawn in 1908, laid up at St. Joseph three years, and taken in 1911 to the Grand River in Michigan, running Grand Haven to within ten miles of Grand Rapids. (L. M. Gordon's "The Influence of River Transportation on St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties, 1830–1860," Indiana Magazine of History, 1950, is the standard corroborating study.)
The lock and the races. In 1844 the South Bend Manufacturing Company — principal stockholders A. R. and J. H. Harper — built the dam at South Bend (art-74-5) and, "in order not to obstruct the river, which by law was navigable as far as Three Rivers, Michigan, put in a lock on the west side of the river at the foot of Washington Street, a short distance north of where the water works reservoir now is." The lock opened into the west race. It never worked well: the gates were faulty and leaked, the lock was shallow, heavier boats had to be dragged through, and captains whistled to collect citizens to pull boats through with ropes. It fell into disuse, the gates rotted, and it was replaced by bulkheads and banked with earth; it served afterward as a tail race for the city water works, with a trunk laid along its bottom, and was partly filled — then, in February 1894, completely filled, every vestige removed. The landing place in South Bend before the dam was Chapin's warehouse, just south of the La Salle Avenue bridge on the west side, at the old red warehouse at the foot of Colfax Avenue. One canal-boat experiment belongs to the record: in 1842 Alexis Coquillard engaged a Fort Wayne canal-boat builder to build the flour boat South Bend, which proved too heavy, drew too much water, and could barely float over the riffles and bars; one trip down to the lake and back ended her use.
The trade and its end. Before the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad was built through South Bend, all of the merchants' merchandise came by river, and the traffic was heavy until 1852. Incoming freight was merchandise for the stores and emigrants' property — Niles crackers a staple from 1840 to 1870. Outgoing: grain, pork, flour, hides, furs, whiskey, pig iron, and iron castings; within twenty miles of South Bend, up and down the river, stood eight distilleries and ten flour mills, and Mishawaka's two blast furnaces and a forge shipped large quantities of pig iron and castings. Federal improvement never came: mass meetings in 1832 at St. Joseph, Berrien Springs, and Niles petitioned Congress without result; the Indiana legislature's resolutions of 1845 and 1846 urging Congress went unanswered; the River and Harbor Convention at Chicago on July 6, 1847 produced nothing favourable. A local writer of 1847 still boasted: "For one hundred and seventy-five miles by the river distance, namely from Union City to St. Joseph, steamboats can navigate its waters… Four steamboats now ply upon it." The end is dated by the engineers: in 1879 government engineers surveyed from Elkhart to the mouth and reported adversely to making the stream navigable; the railroads had usurped the carrying trade, and the river was, in Knoblock's closing phrase, "given over to power production."
Juday's non-navigability, stated from the record. None of this touched Granger's own creek. Juday Creek is a 19-kilometre groundwater-fed trout stream whose legal status is an open drain under the County Drainage Board (art-74-3). No keelboat, steamboat, flatboat, lock, race, landing, or warehouse is recorded on Juday Creek in any source searched — not in Knoblock's navigation history, not in the county record, not in the Juday literature. The working river in the reach this ground faces is the St. Joseph main stem at South Bend and Mishawaka. Juday never floated a cargo; what floated past Granger's basin floated on the river south of the line.