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Before there was a college, a mission, or a name in any European language, there was a carrying place. The ground that is now Notre Dame, Indiana, lies in the valley of the St. Joseph River — in the Miami-Illinois language Sakiwäsipi, the Outlet River — a stream that rises in southern Michigan, runs southwest into Indiana, bends sharply north at the place that would take its name from that bend, and then runs west and north again to Lake Michigan at the twin harbors of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. A river that connects the lake to the interior is a road. A river whose headwater country nearly touches another river running the opposite way — to another sea — is a crossroads. The St. Joseph valley at South Bend is both, and that, more than any later event, is why everything in this section happened where it happened.
The peoples of the valley are named in the record in succession, and the succession should be printed as the record gives it, without flattening. The valley was inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples using the river as a trade avenue of the Great Lakes country. The most recent inhabitants before the American period were the Miami, whose name the French fastened on the river itself, and the Potawatomi, who moved into the region and were, by the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the valley's resident nation — village communities along the St. Joseph and its tributaries, farming, hunting and trading from the lake to the Wabash country. When the French record opens on this valley it is a Potawatomi and Miami world, and it stayed one, in law and in fact, until the cessions and removals told in the companion section and in the removal article below.
The valley's great geographic fact is the portage. Near the south bend of the river, a short overland carry — four to five miles on the classic description, southwest from a landing on the St. Joseph to three small ponds that were the nearest sources of the Kankakee — joined the St. Joseph to the Kankakee River. The Kankakee runs to the Illinois, the Illinois to the Mississippi. Whoever crossed that carry with a canoe passed from the Lake Michigan watershed to the Mississippi watershed, from the St. Lawrence system to the Gulf system, in an afternoon's walk. The early portage literature (Archer Butler Hulbert's Portage Paths, 1903, public domain) treats the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage as one of the keys of the continent, and notes that the Northern Indiana Historical Society put the fact on its seal: the region "was occupied by the Miamis and Pottawatomies" and "was made historic by the early explorers and missionaries who used the Kankakee–St. Joseph River Portage." The portage landing on the St. Joseph stood about two and three-quarter miles northwest of the later courthouse at South Bend — which is to say, the carrying place that decided the valley's importance lay immediately beside, and just west of, the ground this section is about. Notre Dame's lakes sit a short distance east of the portage's river end. The mission would be planted, a century and a half later, within sight of the crossroads' traffic.
The French passage over that carry is documented at a depth that must be printed exactly, because local telling loves to give this valley a longer French pedigree than the papers carry. What the record supports is this. In 1675 Father Jacques Marquette, returning sick from the Illinois country toward St. Ignace, is believed by many authorities to have come up the Kankakee and crossed this portage to the St. Joseph and so down to the lake — believed, and printed here as belief, since Hulbert's own wording is that it is "very probable" on a route "many eminent authorities believe" he took; it is not a documented landing. The documented passage is René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle's. La Salle sailed southeast across Lake Michigan, reached the St. Joseph's mouth on 1 November 1679 and built Fort Miami there, naming the river La Rivière des Miamis — the River of the Miamis. At the end of 1679 he reversed Marquette's supposed course: up the St. Joseph, over the portage to the Kankakee in December 1679, and on down the Illinois as far as the Peoria country before returning to his fort. South Bend's local tradition, repeated in its encyclopedic summaries, calls La Salle the first European to set foot in what is now the city, using this portage in December 1679 — a tradition consistent with the documented itinerary, and printed as tradition where it goes beyond it. French presence in the valley after La Salle was real but thin, and it fixed itself not at the lakes but downriver and up: traders, soldiers and, in the early eighteenth century, Fort St. Joseph near present Niles, some miles north of the lakes, with its Jesuit mission to the Potawatomi and Miami — the mission world whose embers, kept by the Potawatomi themselves through the decades when no priest was resident, are the beginning of the next article. Between the French garrison's fall in the wars of the 1760s and 1830, the valley had no resident mission at all. The ground at the lakes, in those decades, was simply Potawatomi country beside a famous carrying place, waiting for the two forces that would remake it: the treaty cessions, which took the title, and the mission, which came — at the Potawatomi's own asking — while the title was being taken.
Sources: St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan) reference history (native name Sakiwäsipi, "Outlet River"; Miami and Potawatomi as most recent Indigenous inhabitants; the South Bend portage as the second great transfer point to the Kankakee, Illinois and Mississippi; Marquette 1675; La Salle at the river's mouth 1 Nov. 1679, Fort Miami, Rivière des Miamis; La Salle's upriver passage and portage at the end of 1679). Archer Butler Hulbert, Historic Highways of America / Portage Paths (1903) (portage of four to five miles; landing two and three-quarter miles northwest of the South Bend courthouse; ponds at the Kankakee sources; the historical society seal text; Marquette's use of the portage printed as probability). WNIT, Our Town — South Bend (Miami first, Potawatomi following and remaining until the removals of the 1840s; shortest overland route to the Kankakee; La Salle's use of the portage in December 1679). The university fragment of this record (the Allouez-era mission near Fort St. Joseph and its dissolution after 1759 — pointer; not retold here).