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Howard (1907), township frame; the outwash-plain record
Indian Village stands on outwash. Howard's township description, carried at frame strength, gives Clay Township's soil as "chiefly sand and gravel" — the verbatim first-hand extraction of that sentence from the 1907 text stands as a named settler in the note rather than a quotation manufactured here. The physical frame behind it is the Kankakee Outwash Plain: meltwater spread from the Wisconsin-age ice, the plain running eastward in a northeast arc toward South Bend and compressing along the state line into a ten-to-fifteen-mile band along the St. Joseph River, "underlain by sand, with gravel inter-bedded throughout." The town sits in that band, about a mile south of the state line on the river's south side — glacial outwash terrain of sand with inter-bedded gravel, easily worked and quickly drained. The behaviour of the town's one stream corroborates the ground: Juday Creek is groundwater-fed, the signature of a stream sustained by a sand-and-gravel aquifer rather than by surface runoff alone.