The River's Fish in 1880, at This Reach

Chapman's fish list, St. Joseph County waters, 1880

"The waters of this county are quite prolific of the finny tribe." Chapman's fish chapter — the baseline every later survey of this reach is measured against — sorts the county's catch by the period's families. Among the game fish are the black bass, the goggle-eye, the crappie ("croppy"), and two sunfish, "never caught larger than four pounds." The pike family gives "the pickerel, weighing from five to twenty-five pounds, and the gar pike." The suckers run in all the county's streams — red-horse, white-sucker, two black-suckers, mullet — and "the buffalo," which is the buffalofish, a big sucker of the river, and not the bison of the Parkovash; the two animals share a name in this county's record and nothing else. The catfish — channel cat, mud cat, and two small kinds — run "from one to thirty pounds," and the bull-head is "yet abundant." It is a working fisherman's fauna: bass and pickerel at the top, suckers and catfish as the river's reliable weight, and no fish in it that needs a hatchery, a ladder, or a law to be there. Two absences in the 1880 list carry this reach's information. Chapman names no sturgeon for the county's own waters, though the sturgeon was the spear-fish of the fishing floor downstream and the famous fish of Niles a few miles above the state line — the county list is what county fishermen caught in county water, and the great lake-run fish does not appear in it. And he names no walleye, the fish the modern river's anglers know best after the stocked salmonids. The 1880 list is therefore the baseline in both directions for the Mishawaka reach as for the county: what the river held on its own, and what it did not.

Principal sources

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, p. 344 — the fish list, read whole in South Bend's local-animals file and printed here at this reach's size.