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The valley that changed direction
The St. Joseph once ran to the Kankakee; the capture that reversed it is the county's great meltwater event. The basin's deglacial drainage ran first south to the Wabash, then west to the Kankakee, before the final drainage to Lake Michigan. Howard gives the county-history mechanics of the capture: the great ancient Kankakee flowed southwest through the present St. Joseph valley, the Dowagiac joining at South Bend, until the steeper fall won — 141 feet in 38 miles from South Bend to St. Joseph, Michigan, against 93 feet in 92 miles to Momence, a gradient three and a half times greater — aided by an ice gorge at Crum's Point, seven miles below South Bend, until a Wenger Creek sandbar sealed the old Kankakee bed and made the modern river. The meltwater routing touches this township directly: waters of the St. Joseph valley crossed the till plain south and east of the future South Bend — Union Township's ground — entering the Kankakee valley, so the township stood on the meltwater route into the Kankakee system. The system's catastrophe is the Kankakee Torrent, the flood that scoured the Kankakee valley, linked by the geological surveys' researchers (Monaghan and colleagues, GSA 2016) to collective discharges from the interlobate margins of all three lobes; Illinois flood deposits date it to about 19,000 years ago — and the abstract is explicit that no dates exist from the upstream Indiana–Michigan source area, the OSL ages in hand (16.0 ± 1.2 thousand years for Lake Michigan outwash; 17.9 ± 1.1 for Huron-Erie) leaving a roughly 2,000-year gap its authors call problematic. The Torrent's Indiana headwater chronology stands unproven in the record reached, and prints so.