The Fish: Chapman's List and Juday Creek

BASELINE, BOUNDARY, AND THE ONE MEASURED CREEK

The baseline stands in the Story of Granger section: Chapman's fish list — black bass, goggle-eye, crappie and sunfish at the top, pickerel of five to twenty-five pounds, the buffalo and red-horse among the suckers, channel and mud catfish, the bullhead "yet abundant" — is the county's fish record of 1880, the river-and-lake fauna of a county whose waters were the St. Joseph, its marshes and its millponds. The basin that list swam in holds, on the modern count, ninety-seven fish species historically native to the St. Joseph River watershed — and the river those species run is now a stair: 190 dams in the watershed, seventeen on the mainstem itself. The fish ladders completed in 1992 on the lowest five mainstem dams pass the salmon and trout up to Twin Branch Dam at Mishawaka — but roughly 94 percent of the fish passing are salmon and trout, the ladders shaped for the introduced sport fish, and the native company of Chapman's list, the sturgeon at its head, climbs them barely at all. The lake sturgeon is therefore this article's boundary fish, told at the river's size and claimed at no larger: in the mid-to-late 1800s the Niles reach of this river was famous for it — fish to twelve feet and three hundred pounds taken, their roe exported to Russia as caviar — and sturgeon ran the river as far up as Hillsdale County, Michigan. Today spawning fish rarely reach even Niles, stopped in effect by the Berrien Springs Dam, which cuts 155 miles of historic spawning river out of the run. None of that water is Granger's: the St. Joseph touches only the western edge of Clay Township, far downstream of nothing and upstream of the whole drama — the sturgeon belongs in this section at boundary size precisely because the greatest fish of the county's river never had business on this ground beyond the riverbank the CDP barely owns.

The measured water is the creek.Geological Survey (station 04101370) — is the one stream on this ground whose fish have a dated count series, and this article builds the banked big-fish article out rather than repeating it: the Stories-Mysteries leg has already verdicted the creek's claim (one of the state's few naturally reproducing brown trout streams, IDNR confirmation October 1980, the Izaak Walton League fishery of the 1930s, USGS WRIR 95-4135's surveys of 1993–94), and nothing here reopens it. What the programme record adds is the creek as a managed, monitored system across four decades. Notre Dame's studies under Randy Hellenthal have run on the creek since 1978 — more than 150 students across forty years by the university's own count. Their first great finding was a collapse: the net-spinning caddisflies, the creek's clean-water insects, fell 86 percent (Kohlhepp 1991; Kohlhepp and Hellenthal 1992), and the cause was pinned experimentally — fine sediment, the development watershed's gift, which the caddisflies cannot abide (Runde and Hellenthal 2000). In 1997 two 400-metre reaches of the creek were relocated and restored outright for the Warren Golf Course's construction — the creek as engineering problem and ecological patient at once. The seventeen-year fish monitoring that followed (Shirey and colleagues, Ecology and Society, 2016; sampling before the restoration in 1997, twice yearly 1998–2001, annually 2002–2013) gives the leg its dated count series at assemblage size: across those years the fish community shifted measurably away from the non-native salmonids — the stocked brown and rainbow trout of the fishery's fame — toward native centrarchids, rock bass, largemouth bass and smallmouth bass holding the restored water, while the native nongame standbys, Johnny darter and mottled sculpin, held or increased. The restoration worked, and the watershed is outrunning it: fine sediment re-accumulated even in the restored reaches, and the university's 2022 and 2024 capstone resamplings found the restored reaches still richer in macroinvertebrates than the unrestored, but overall abundance and diversity down across twenty years — the creek's count series, as it stands in November 2026, reads improvement at reach size and decline at watershed size, both in the same data. That is the honest modern fish record for Granger's one famous stream: Chapman's bass-and-bullhead water, famous for a stocked trout, measured into a native-fish recovery inside a suburbanizing watershed that is slowly taking the gains back.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Chapter II, Fishes: the baseline list — quoted and surveyed in the Story of Granger section article.
2. St. Joseph River basin record (River Basin Commission / state fisheries literature): 97 historically native fish species; 190 dams in the watershed, 17 on the mainstem; the 1992 fish ladders to Twin Branch Dam passing ~94% salmon and trout.
3. Lake sturgeon record (Michigan DNR / basin histories): the Niles reach fishery of the mid-to-late 1800s, fish to 12 feet and 300 pounds, roe exported as caviar; runs to Hillsdale County, Michigan; the Berrien Springs Dam cutting 155 miles of spawning river.
4. This build's Stories-Mysteries leg, the Juday Creek article: the banked verdict and its sources (USGS WRIR 95-4135; Hellenthal, St. Joseph River Basin Commission symposium, 10 May 2019; IDNR October 1980; Izaak Walton League) — built out from, not repeated or re-verdicted.
5. Hellenthal programme record (University of Notre Dame): studies since 1978; 150-plus students over 40 years; Kohlhepp (1991) and Kohlhepp & Hellenthal (1992): the 86% net-spinning caddisfly decline; Runde & Hellenthal (2000): sediment intolerance; the 1997 relocation and restoration of two 400-metre reaches (Warren Golf Course).
6. Shirey et al. (2016), Ecology and Society: the 17-year fish monitoring series (1997; 1998–2001 biannual; 2002–2013 annual) — assemblage shift from non-native Salmonidae to native Centrarchidae; Johnny darter and mottled sculpin stable or increased; sediment re-accumulation. Notre Dame capstone resampling 2022/2024: restored reaches still richer; overall abundance and diversity down over 20 years.