The river itself: two hundred miles of water, two rivers of one name

THE COURSE, AS THE SURVEYS CARRY IT

The river that names the city is a Michigan river on an Indiana errand: The St. Joseph rises in Hillsdale County, Michigan, at Baw Beese Lake near the county seat — within five miles, the federal watershed record notes, of the headwaters of the other St. Joseph River, the unrelated stream of the same name that runs down through Fort Wayne to Lake Erie. The two rivers begin almost side by side and flow to different lakes, and the confusion between them runs through the whole literature of both cities; this section is about the western one. From Baw Beese Lake the river runs southwest through the Michigan lake country, crosses into Indiana in Elkhart County, gathers the Elkhart River at Elkhart, passes Mishawaka, and comes into South Bend still flowing south — then, at the bend this city is named for, turns and runs north again, recrosses the state line into Michigan near Bertrand, passes Niles and Berrien Springs, and empties into Lake Michigan at the harbor of St. Joseph, Michigan, which shares its name. The watershed the federal record draws for it covers 4,685 square miles in fifteen counties — eight in Michigan, seven in Indiana — with 3,742 miles of streams in it, and stands as the third-largest watershed draining into Lake Michigan.

Its length is printed two ways, and both stand: The main stem is measured at 206 miles in the figure the river's federal reference record carries, and at 210 miles in other published accounts, the difference a matter of where the measurement starts in the Hillsdale County lake country and how the meanders are followed. No figure is averaged here; the river is 206 miles on the Geological Survey's accounting and 210 in the rounder telling, and a reader who meets either number elsewhere should know the other exists. What no account disputes is the shape: a river that flows south out of one state, dips into another to make one great bend, and flows back north across the line it crossed — so that South Bend, which sits near its southernmost point, is downstream of Elkhart and upstream of Niles, and the water in front of the city's dams fell as rain in Michigan and will be in Lake Michigan within days.

Sources:

1. The St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan) reference record, compiled from the U.S. Geological Survey and the federal watershed literature — the 206-mile main stem, the rise at Baw Beese Lake in Hillsdale County within five miles of the Maumee-basin St. Joseph's headwaters, the 4,685-square-mile watershed in fifteen counties, 3,742 river miles, and the third-largest watershed draining to Lake Michigan; the 210-mile figure as carried in the river's general published accounts.
2. Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River, Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1925) — the course in one sentence: source in Hillsdale County, flowing southwesterly into Indiana in Elkhart County, "then turning northerly, leaving the state in St. Joseph County and entering Michigan in Berrien County, thence flowing northwesterly into Lake Michigan at the port of St. Joseph."