The river's names in sequence, each with its record

Seventeenth century to the present form

The sequence, from Knoblock's Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. 8 No. 4, 1925) and the Notre Dame Magazine's sourced account (its sources: Gregory Dowd; John Palmer of the St. Joseph County Public Library's local history; the Northern Indiana Center for History). The river was first named, in the French record, "the river of the Miamis" — La Rivière des Miamis — for the Miami people of its country; La Salle, ascending in 1679, called it the Miami River. It then carried "St. Joseph's river of the Lakes," shortened to St. Joseph's, and settled as St. Joseph. The earliest "Saint Joseph River" reference the magazine's account gives is 1689, in a French Canadian land grant for Mission Saint Joseph near present Niles, Michigan. The Native names print at the strength their carriers give them: the Potawatomi name Sheggwe, glossed "happened spontaneously"; a possibly-Miami name Sagwasibi, "coming-out river," for its connection from the Kankakee country to Lake Michigan; the GNIS form "Sakiwäsipi" also circulates in secondary extracts — the spellings print whole, unmerged, as variant records of one name-family. The specific settler the row names — Ronald Baker's place-names study and the Indiana Names Research Center's own river record — was not itself retrieved; the sequence above stands on Knoblock and the magazine's sourced account, and the Baker/INRC record is named for the manuscript-strength reading.

Named gap: the Indiana Names Research Center record and Baker's entry for the river, read at first hand — settler: Baker, From Needmore to Prosperity (1995), and the INRC file.

Sources: Knoblock (1925), via archive.org full text; Notre Dame Magazine, river-names account (sources as stated in the article).