The river and its south bend

The St. Joseph of Lake Michigan — the ground's first fact

The course: The St. Joseph River rises in Hillsdale County, Michigan — the county histories say it plainly — and runs southwest across southern Michigan, crosses the state line into Indiana, and flows west through the present county past Mishawaka's ground to the place where it does the thing the city is named for. Here the river, which has been running away from its lake, reaches the southernmost point of its course and turns: north again, past the portage landing, up through present Niles, and down to its mouth at present St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, where it empties into Lake Michigan. The first French on the river called it the river of the Miamis — La Salle's name for it, from the nation whose towns then stood on its banks — and its enduring name is the saint's. Two rivers in Indiana bear the name St. Joseph: this one, of Lake Michigan, and the St. Joseph of the Maumee at Fort Wayne. They are different waters in different watersheds, and the treaty clerks of the 1820s already had to write "of Lake Michigan" and "of the Miami" to keep them apart. Every document in this section means the river of the lake.

The divide: The ground the city stands on is, in the words of the federal writers' guide of 1941, at "the crest of the watershed dividing the St. Lawrence basin from the basin of the Mississippi." West of the bend, the land drains the other way: the Kankakee rises in marshy ground in this same county and runs southwest to join the Des Plaines and form the Illinois River, a Mississippi tributary. A traveler in a canoe could therefore pass from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico's drainage by crossing a few miles of nearly level marsh at this one place — which is the whole reason there is a city here, and the subject of the portage entry below. The bend was also a boundary the records keep using: the river divided tribal territories in the French accounts, marked treaty lines in 1828, and still forms pieces of the county's and the city's own edges.

Fishery and power, at the record's size: The period accounts treat the river and the marsh west of it as a fishery and hunting ground of the first order — the water and wetland that fed the valley's villages and drew its trade — and the commercial fishing the documents describe in detail belongs to the river's mouth, at the lake, which is Michigan ground and another file's. Of power, this section records only the siting fact: the river falls at the bend, and the founders took that fall for mills within the plat's first years — Coquillard's Kankakee race is the standing example — because a townsite with water power was worth more than one without. The dams, races and factories that followed belong to the civic record; what belongs here is that the fall, like the portage, was in the ground before the plat was.

Sources: Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880) — the river "takes its rise in Hillsdale county, Michigan"; Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State, WPA (1941) — the watershed-crest description, carried in the National Register record for downtown South Bend; Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, vol. 1 (1907), on La Salle's name for the river; the treaty texts' own "St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" / "St. Joseph's of the Miami" distinction (1826, 1828).