The River's Fish: Chapman's List, the Sturgeon, and the Managed River

County frame for the St. Joseph River; township frame for the Kankakee headwaters and Terre Coupee's creeks

Lead: Frames straight, as ordered: Olive Township's own river ground is not the St. Joseph River at South Bend. It is the Kankakee's headwater edge — the river rises a mile west of South Bend and crosses the county's southwest into La Porte County, through and past this township's south and west — and Terre Coupee's creeks, Grapevine Creek first among them, which Chapman names as the shallow lake's outlet to the Kankakee. The St. Joseph River material below is county frame, labeled as such wherever it appears.

The baseline is Chapman's fish chapter (1880, p. 344), and it is a warmwater list: the “sickle-backed” game family — black bass, goggle-eye, crappie (“croppy, or big black sun-fish”) and two common sunfish, none “caught larger than four pounds”; the pike family in two species, pickerel “weighing from five to twenty-five pounds” and gar pike; the sucker family — “the buffalo, red-horse, white-sucker, two species of black-suckers and mullet” — found “in all the streams of the county… wherever there is water”; channel catfish, mud catfish and two small catfish “from one to thirty pounds,” bullhead “yet abundant”; plus chub, silver-sides, freshwater herring and minnows “in the smallest spring branches, as well as the larger streams.” Two reading notes: Chapman's “buffalo” here is the sucker-family fish, not the mammal of the bison article; and his list contains no sturgeon, no trout and no salmon — the first is a silence this article reports without over-reading (a county list of “the various genera found here” that omits the great fish), and the second pair had not yet been put in the river by anyone.

The lake sturgeon, at DNR strength, is a Great Lakes–Mississippi fish listed Endangered on the IUCN Red List (assessed 2019), state-endangered in Illinois and ranked critically imperiled (S1) in Indiana in the NatureServe record: a bottom fish of large rivers and lakes, blocked from spawning reaches by dams and hurt by channelization and siltation — which is to say, by exactly what was done to both of this county's rivers. The St. Joseph River of this county is a Lake Michigan tributary within the sturgeon's historic basin, and the Kankakee is an Illinois River tributary within it; but no St. Joseph County or Kankakee-headwater sturgeon record — catch, spawning run or DNR survey entry — was found in the sources reached for this row, and the fish is printed here as a basin fish whose local record is a named gap, not as a Terre Coupee fish.

The managed river is the St. Joseph, at county frame: the St. Joseph River Trout and Salmon Project, created by Indiana and Michigan in the late 1970s, stocking from 1984, built the Richard Clay Bodine State Fish Hatchery at Mishawaka (completed 1983) and five fish ladders — Berrien Springs, Niles and Buchanan in Michigan; Mishawaka (1991) and South Bend in Indiana — completed in 1992, opening the lower 63 miles from Lake Michigan to the Twin Branch Dam. DNR counts passage by video camera at the South Bend ladder; the fall 1992 monitoring at three ladders counted 5,081 fish at Berrien Springs and 3,403 at South Bend, 99.6 percent of them salmonids — steelhead and Chinook foremost. The program's modern shape is still DNR-managed and still counted: about 800 steelhead through the South Bend ladder from September 1 in DNR's October 15, 2026 fishing report. None of this infrastructure stands in Olive Township; the township's fish story remains Chapman's list, the creeks, and the Kankakee headwaters — and the absence of a published modern fish survey for those creeks in the record reached is printed as the row's gap.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), p. 344 (fishes) and pp. 336–338 (Terre Coupee outlet, Grapevine Creek; Kankakee rise and course).
2. Indiana DNR, South Bend Fish Ladder (in.gov) — Trout and Salmon Project history, five ladders, 63 miles, video monitoring.
3. Historical marker, Mishawaka Fish Ladder (Indiana DNR, 2013; HMdb) — project conceived 1970s; Bodine Hatchery 1983; Mishawaka ladder 1991.
4. Michigan DNR Fisheries Technical Report 94-5 (1994) — fall 1992 passage estimates, Berrien Springs 5,081, South Bend 3,403, salmonids 99.6%.
5. Indiana DNR fishing report, Oct. 15, 2026 (via The Gill Net summary) — about 800 steelhead through South Bend ladder since Sept. 1, 2026.
6. IUCN Red List, Acipenser fulvescens (2022 assessment) — Endangered; Illinois DNR — state endangered, dam/channelization threats; NatureServe ranking S1 for Indiana (via COSEWIC status report).