The river and the fall

THE RIVER AT MISHAWAKA

The whole city is an annotation on one short stretch of fast water: The St. Joseph River reaches Mishawaka out of Elkhart County, flowing west and a little south, and at the future townsite its bed drops over broken rock in a rapids. Timothy E. Howard's county history of 1907 gives the fall's measure as the surveyors found it: "The actual fall of the river for a few rods at the rapids has been found to be two feet and nine inches." Two feet nine inches is not much of a waterfall. It was enough — enough, with a dam thrown across it, to turn waterwheels on both banks for a century, and enough before that to concentrate everything that made the place worth settling: a ford where the trails crossed, a fishery in the broken water, and timber and game in the bottoms. The Potawatomi word the settlers took up for the place — carried in the city's commissioned history as M'Shehwahkeek, "swift flowing water" or "heavy timbered rapids," and in Howard as "Big Rapids" — is a description of this water before it is anything else; the name's full testing stands in the Story of Mishawaka section.

Below the rapids the river runs on westward through the city's heart in a broad S, past the dam and the downtown bridges, past ground that held the woolen mills on the north bank and the brewery on the south, and so down to South Bend's great bend and the turn north to Lake Michigan. The river is some sixty-three miles of fishable, dam-broken water from Mishawaka's upper dam to the lake — a figure that matters to the fish-ladder entry below. It is also, in flood, the city's standing hazard, and in every era the subject of the record that follows: dammed, raced, bridged, flooded, fished, cleaned and finally walked, end to end, as a park.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907) — the fall at the rapids measured at two feet nine inches; the name as "Big Rapids."
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history, City of Mishawaka) — M'Shehwahkeek and its renderings; Hurd's choice of the rapids site.
3. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish & Wildlife — the sixty-three miles of river from Lake Michigan to the base of the Twin Branch Dam.