The bend itself

THE FEATURE THE CITY IS NAMED FOR

The bend is a change of mind in the water: A river running south meets, at this ground, the low divide that separates the Lake Michigan drainage from the Kankakee's, and instead of cutting through it the St. Joseph turns — first west, then north — in the broad curve that the maps of two centuries draw as the feature of the place. Knoblock's 1925 map of the navigation states it as a cartographer's fact: the river's "abrupt turn northerly at South Bend, Indiana." The Story of South Bend section of this record tells how the turn named a post office in 1830 and a city after it; what belongs here is the physical thing. The town was platted on the west bank, on a bluff above a low, swampy bottom. Knoblock, describing the bank as the boat-builders of 1832 knew it, fixes the ground precisely: the real bank of the river ran straight north and south through town, the land on the west side low and swampy except for a narrow strip of sand at the water's edge, and the bluff's edge did not follow the bank but left the river near where the dam now stands, retreated obliquely across what became Washington Street, and met the river again at La Salle Avenue — the low ground between bluff and river, afterward occupied by the west race and its buildings, covered in willows, so seldom entered that townspeople reached the water by going around either end of the swamp on old Native trails.

The bend's inside shore, in other words, was a marsh behind a sand rim, and the city's first century of engineering — the races, the lock, the waterworks, the filled ground its downtown stands on — is the story of building on that marsh. The bend is also a continental doorstep: the Indiana Writers' Project's 1941 account of the city places it "at the crest of the watershed dividing the St. Lawrence basin from the basin of the Mississippi" — the low divide the portage crossed, with the Kankakee's and ultimately the Mississippi's waters beginning a few miles west of the riverbank. The portage that made the place a crossroads left the river at this bend and crossed to the Kankakee; its measured lengths and its long history stand in Before the City and in the Story of South Bend section, and are not retold here.

Sources:

1. Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (1925) — the map's "abrupt turn northerly at South Bend," and the west bank's 1832 geography: the straight bank, the swamp and willow bottom, the bluff's oblique retreat from the dam site to La Salle Avenue, and the trails around the swamp.
2. This record's Spine and Before the City sections — the naming of the place for the bend, and the portage from the bend to the Kankakee, cross-referenced.