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Michigan DNR Fisheries Technical Report 94-5; Indiana DNR Bodine Hatchery record; counts from fall 1992
The St. Joseph River was re-engineered for salmon, and the engineering is the county's fish story of the last half-century. The St. Joseph River Trout and Salmon Project, created by Indiana and Michigan in the late 1970s, completed five fish-passage facilities in 1992, opening the lower 63 miles of river from Lake Michigan to the Twin Branch Dam at Mishawaka; Indiana's ladders stand at South Bend (Seitz Park) and Mishawaka (Central Park), Michigan's at Berrien Springs, Niles, and Buchanan. The Richard Clay Bodine State Fish Hatchery at Mishawaka, completed in 1983, releases coho salmon and steelhead of the Skamania strain; stocking began in 1984, and in November 2010 about 11,000 Indiana-produced coho were stocked at South Bend — the first Indiana-produced coho for the river. The fall 1992 video counts give the passage its measure: 5,081 fish at Berrien Springs and 3,403 at South Bend, salmonines 99.6 percent of all passage. Against that full record, the great-fish test stands where Chapman's list left it: no lake sturgeon record for the St. Joseph appears in the carriers read, and none is asserted here.