The river's making, and the creek

THE CHANNEL AND ITS TRIBUTARY

The present river is a captured river: the St. Joseph runs in a channel cut by glacial meltwater — the great Kankakee torrent that drained the ice margins westward — and the river's making, its capture and reversal out of that older, larger system, is carried whole in the South Bend and Mishawaka legs where the portage and the rapids give it scale. This ground's reach of that river is the quiet stretch between the Elkhart's mouth above and the Mishawaka rapids below: a working river road for as long as people have moved on it, its south bank terraced, its fords named in the road record of the 1830s. Howard's geography of the township states its drainage in one line: the river flows east–west through the township's north part and "receives two small streams, Twin Branch and Baugo, from the south" (Howard, p. 292); Chapman adds the townsite's own reach — the river enters the county on section 9, township 37 north, range 4 east, the Osceola section (Chapman, p. 338) — and a pioneer's landscape south of it: a large marsh running southeast from the river almost the length of the township, three-quarters of a mile to two miles wide, with an elevated "Island" of two or three hundred acres standing in it (Chapman, p. 789). The creek is the ground's own water. Baugo Creek drains the Penn Township interior northward to the townsite; in 1831–32 the locality's first sawmill was built on it near the townsite, and its lower course was changed again in the modern era — the Lincoln Highway Association's Indiana byway guide records that a dam project it dates to 1903 — the dam undated and unproven on the record reached (The Land, whole) — just beyond the county line, created Baugo Bay, the backwater at the creek's mouth, and cut the old Vistula Road in two, forcing the highway around it. The creek today carries a federal survey point but no continuous gage: the United States Geological Survey's station 04101080, Baugo Creek at Osceola, stands on the creek at the town — a station of record, not a continuous-record gage — the modern instrument record of the same fall of water the mill dam first used. A fuller hydrologic history of the creek belongs to The Land; the bay's making and the road it severed are carried in Corridors.