The river's making: the reversal, and the lake that drained two ways

The process record · CAPTURE, PONDING AND DRAINAGE AS PROCESS

The present courses of this ground's waters are the end of an argument the ice started — and one of the rivers once flowed the other way. The St. Joseph River's course is the region's great reversal: in its ancestral form the upper St. Joseph drained southward, into the Kankakee basin and so to the Mississippi; glacial ponding and the opening of the Lake Michigan outlet captured and reversed it, and the river now runs north and west to the lake — the divide of the feature article, so level that men once dug a race across it and made the water flow both ways, is the low saddle the reversal left behind. The Kankakee's making is the companion process: ponded as glacial Lake Kankakee between the moraines and the ice, drained at the Momence breach, it took its present course across its own lake floor as the marsh river of record — the river of the flood articles, whose headwaters rise, Chapman notes, about a mile west of South Bend and run southwest past this township's sections into La Porte County. And Terre Coupee's shallow lake is the process at township size: ponded on the outwash at the plain's east end, it drained by Grapevine Creek to the Kankakee in the old telling — and, in the historical period, by the ditch and the tile, Chapman's own summary being the whole of it: "This prairie was very marshy before it was drained and cultivated; it is now one of the most fertile spots in the State of Indiana." Capture, ponding, drainage: the rapids-and-falls form of the checklist's pattern has no instance on this flat ground, and the making prints in its true forms — a river reversed, a lake let out, and a marsh ditched into the county's best farm.

Sources:

1. The geological record of the St. Joseph–Kankakee drainage as dug for this run — the ancestral southward drainage and the capture/reversal, at regional-record strength.
2. Chapman (1880), pp. 338 (the Kankakee's rise and course), 335–336 (Grapevine Creek, the lake's outlet) and 765 (the marsh drained) — read at the page for this section.