South Bend Before the City: The Land and the Tribes

Before the City · the land and the tribes

South Bend is a river's decision before it is anything else. The St. Joseph River, flowing down out of Michigan toward its lake, makes the southernmost turn of its whole course here — the south bend the city is named for — and a few miles west of that bend the land falls away into the headwaters of the Kankakee, a river of the other watershed, running to the Illinois and the Mississippi. Between the two rivers lay a carrying place, a portage of a few marshy miles, and for as long as the record reaches that portage is why this ground mattered: it was one of the hinges between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi world. This section is the record of the ground itself and of the peoples who held it — the Myaamia, whose own account of their beginning is set on this river, and the Potawatomi, whose valley this was in the treaty century — down to the survey lines and the plat of 1831, where the city's record begins and this section ends. The French and British centuries on the river are told at the size the documents give them; the fort that guarded the river stood upriver in present Michigan and is boundary-printed as such. Mishawaka's ground, east along the same river, is its own city's and is not taken up here.