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1880–2004, drainage and its animal cost · Run B #220
The marsh of this ground is not the Kankakee, and this article keeps the two apart before it joins their stories: Penn Township's wet ground is, first, the Baugo Creek bottoms where the creek crosses the township's north to Baugo Bay on the St. Joseph River, and, second, Chapman's great Penn marsh of the township chapter (p. 789) — a marsh about two miles wide with an elevated "Island" of 200 to 300 acres standing in it, the township's second geography, growing hay and mint where it grew anything. The base build's O-5 pass established, and this section repeats without forcing, that Chapman's marsh axis — head at the river near South Bend, running southeast — does not fit the Baugo bottoms; the identification is unmade in the record and stays unmade here. The Grand Kankakee Marsh, which the audit's Fort Wayne form names, begins at the county's western edge — the Kankakee rises, Chapman himself fixes it (p. 338), about a mile west of South Bend — and its animal history is county frame for this section, printed below at that size and no larger.
What lived in the marsh ground, Chapman tells in the Waders and Swimmers of his bird chapter, and he dates the mechanism of loss in one clause: the waders "frequented the marshes, but cultivation has drained their favorite haunts." The whooping crane, always rare, was by 1880 "now never seen"; the sandhill cranes still stopped on their journeys; the herons — great blue, green, night, least bittern, American bittern — still visited; glossy ibis had been seen; Wilson's and red phalaropes had frequented the county's swamps; the snipe family was common "in and around the swamps," with Wilson's snipe, sandpipers, willet, yellow-leg, long-billed curlew, rails and the coot. The Swimmers "have almost disappeared": the duck family — wood-duck, canvas-back, red-head, mallard, pintail, teals, spoonbill, gadwall, baldpate, mergansers — which had visited the ponds and streams "in large numbers before it became so thickly settled," by 1880 mostly confined itself "to the wilder places." That is the animal half the base build's land articles lacked: Chapman's own before-picture, and his own named cause, drainage by cultivation, printed from the survey itself.
The after-course is dated in the township's drainage record, carried whole in the Farms leg and pointed to here: the nineteenth-century ditching of the great marsh, farm by farm — itself a named gap there, settling in the county commissioners' and drainage board's minutes and the surveyor's ditch files — and the modern regulated-drain course of the creek, Baugo Creek made a regulated drain in 1987–88 under a Joint Baugo Creek Drainage Board, a clearing and logjam-removal project of nearly five years, with four 300-foot sediment traps maintained by the Elkhart County Drainage Board. The watershed's modern governing document, the Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan (IDEM/MACOG, September 2004; 49,581 acres in Elkhart and St. Joseph counties), is candidly a water-quality plan, not a wildlife survey: its endangered-species section records the federal inquiry answered for the watershed — the federally endangered Indiana bat, the then-threatened bald eagle, and the candidate eastern massasauga listed as within the watershed's concern — and its fish-community evidence is an impairment record (the creek on the state's impaired-waters list, E. coli geometric mean 1,919 colonies/100 ml in IDEM's 2000 basin assessment, the highest exceedance in the basin). No species-by-species wildlife census of the Baugo bottoms stands in the plan or in any source reached, and this section does not invent one: the marsh's animal story on this ground is Chapman's 1880 list, the drainage dates, and the plan's three named species of concern. The county-frame parallel, printed once and at county size: the Grand Kankakee Marsh — 500,000-plus acres at its greatest extent, the "Everglades of the North" — was full of market hunters and gun clubs in its shooting years (the English Lake Gun Club, the Maksawba Club; field plover "much sought after for the market by pot-hunters" in Maurice Thompson's 1888 list for the state geologist), and was destroyed as a marsh between 1882 and 1917 by channelizing and ditching, taking with it, on the standard telling, a fifth of the migratory bird population of the United States and Indiana's prairie-chicken remnant with it; sandhill cranes, locally abundant breeders in northwest Indiana until 1929, now pass through in tens of thousands each autumn at Jasper-Pulaski. The market gun and the ditch did the same work in both marshes; only the Kankakee's is documented at the scale of a literature, and this section borrows none of that scale for the Baugo bottoms.
Sources: Chapman (1880), Penn Township chapter, p. 789 (the great marsh and its Island), as carried first-hand in the base build's Farms leg; Chapman, Ch. II, pp. 338 (the Kankakee's rise west of South Bend). Farms leg of this build (drainage course: Baugo Creek regulated drain 1987–88; Joint Baugo Creek Drainage Board; sediment traps; the nineteenth-century ditching named as a gap settling in county drainage records). Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan — Plan I, Baugo Creek–Wisler Ditch (IDEM with MACOG, final September 2004), pp. 21 ff. (endangered-species inquiry: Indiana bat, bald eagle, eastern massasauga) and IDEM 2000 basin assessment as carried in the plan (E. coli 1,919/100 ml; impaired listing). Kankakee frame: Grand Kankakee Marsh record (marsh extent; destruction 1882–1917 by channelization; market hunting and gun clubs; Thompson's 1888 bird list; sandhill crane breeding to 1929 and the Jasper-Pulaski autumn staging) — printed at county frame only. Identification flag: Chapman's great marsh is NOT identified with the Baugo Creek bottoms (base build O-5 finding, restated).