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1880–1992 and after, the fishery remade · Run B #221
Chapman's fish list is five families long, and the most important fact in it is an absence: "The waters of this country are quite prolific of the finny tribe," Chapman writes (p. 344), and enumerates: the Sickle-backed family — black bass, goggle-eye, crappie ("croppy, or big black sun-fish") and two common sunfish, game fish "never caught larger than four pounds"; the Pike family, two species — pickerel "from five to twenty-five pounds" and the gar pike; the Sucker family — buffalo, red-horse, white sucker, two black suckers and "mullet ranick," fish that "abound wherever there is water"; the Cat-fish family — channel cat, mud cat and two small catfish, "from one to thirty pounds," the bull-head "yet abundant"; and besides these, chub, silver-sides, fresh-water herring and the minnows of "the smallest spring branches." There is no sturgeon in Chapman's St. Joseph County — no sturgeon in the list, the narrative, or the county's commerce as he prints it. That absence is the baseline for the item's great fish, and it is printed as an absence in the survey, not as proof the fish never entered the river.
The lake sturgeon between the dams is, on the record reached, a fish of the river's lower course and of the state's lists rather than of this reach. The species is Indiana's only endangered fish by rule — Acipenser fulvescens, state endangered under 312 IAC 9-6-9 and on the DNR's Fishes of Indiana list (revised June 2024) as SE — and Michigan has listed it as threatened since 1994. Indiana's monitored remnant native population is not this river's: the DNR's nongame program has monitored the East Fork White River population, the last native population in the Ohio River drainage, since 1996. For the St. Joseph River itself, the record reached documents the fish's limiting condition without documenting the fish on this ground: a river cut by dams from Lake Michigan to the Twin Branch dam above Mishawaka, its migratory fishery rebuilt for salmonids (below), its sturgeon — historically a Lake Michigan tributary spawner across the basin, at roughly one percent of historic Great Lakes abundance on the federal restoration record — nowhere surveyed, stocked, or reported in the Indiana DNR St. Joseph River record this section reached. This section therefore prints the sturgeon at its documented size: the great fish of the river system, state-endangered, its passage blocked by the same dam stair that the salmon climb by ladders, and not claimed — present, spawning, or stocked — for the Osceola reach on any record reached. The settler for a stronger claim is named: the Indiana DNR's St. Joseph River fish-survey record at survey strength, which this section sought and did not reach beyond the list and program level.
The managed river, by contrast, is documented whole, and its dates are the item's second half. The St. Joseph River Trout and Salmon Project was conceived in the 1970s by the Indiana and Michigan DNRs with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to extend Michigan's established trout and salmon fishery into Indiana: infrastructure of one hatchery — the Richard Clay Bodine State Fish Hatchery on Mishawaka's east side, completed 1983, rearing coho salmon and steelhead (its notable strain the Skamania) — and five fish-passage facilities, the ladders at Berrien Springs, Buchanan and Niles in Michigan and at South Bend and Mishawaka in Indiana, the Mishawaka ladder built in 1991 at the historic overflow dam just west of this township. Stocking into the river began in 1984. When the final ladder was completed in 1992, migratory fish could move from Lake Michigan 63 miles upstream to the base of the Twin Branch dam — the first time, the St. Joseph River Basin Commission records, that two states had jointly implemented a fish-passage project at that scale. The dated "1992 count" of the audit's test is the ladder system's completion year; a published 1992 fish count for the ladders was not reached in this section and is not printed as one. The program runs on: in November 2010 the DNR stocked approximately 11,000 coho salmon near Veterans Memorial Park, South Bend — the first coho produced and stocked into the St. Joseph River by Indiana since the program began in 1984, from surplus at the Bodine and Mixsawbah hatcheries. The river at Osceola is thus, on the record, a native warm-water fishery of Chapman's families, overlaid since 1984 by a managed cold-water migration that passes the township's frontage on its way between the lake and the Twin Branch dam.
Sources: Chapman (1880), p. Lake sturgeon status: Indiana Administrative Code 312 IAC 9-6-9 (lake sturgeon endangered, rule filed 1997, readopted since); Indiana DNR, Fishes of Indiana List, revised June 2024 (Acipenseridae: lake sturgeon SE); Indiana DNR nongame fish and mussel program (East Fork White River monitoring since 1996; lake sturgeon listed endangered); Michigan listing as threatened since 1994 and basin restoration context, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service / Michigan DNR restoration record (historic abundance ~1%). Managed river: Indiana DNR historical marker, "Mishawaka Fish Ladder" (erected 2013; project conceived 1970s; Bodine Hatchery completed 1983; Mishawaka ladder constructed 1991; five ladders; 63 miles to the Twin Branch dam); St. Joseph River Basin Commission (ladder network completed 1992; first two-state fish-passage project at that scale); Indiana DNR release, November 2010 (approx. 11,000 coho stocked at South Bend; stocking program begun 1984). Gap flag: no 1992 ladder fish count and no St. Joseph River sturgeon survey record were reached; none is printed.