The river's names

FOUR LANGUAGES OF RECORD

The oldest name is about what the river does: The Miami-Illinois name for the river is carried in the scholarly record as saakiiweesiipiiwi, also written Sakiwäsipi — "Outlet River," the coming-out river, a name for its function as the connector between the interior and Lake Michigan. The Potawatomi name is different in kind: Sheggwe, "happened spontaneously," which the river's keepers attach to a legend of a man who would materialize on the banks like a mushroom. That name and its legend stand whole in this record's Folklore section, carried there by Notre Dame Magazine on the word of three named keepers; they are pointed to here, not retold. What this section adds is the European chain. La Salle, who came up the river in 1679, named it for the people on its banks: the Rivière des Miamis, the River of the Miamis. Knoblock's history prints the succession as he had it: first "The river of the Miamis," later "St. Joseph's river of the Lakes," shortened to St. Joseph's, and then to St. Joseph. The saint enters through the mission at the river's lower reach: the earliest reference to a "Saint Joseph River" that the university's researchers could find is in a French land grant of 1689, deeding property near present Niles to Jesuit missionaries for the establishment of Mission Saint Joseph — the post that became Fort St. Joseph, ten miles below this city, Michigan ground whose name the whole river came to carry.

Who gave the name is itself a small, honest quarrel: The county history of 1879 gives the honor to Jacques Marquette — that in 1673, coasting the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, he discovered the stream, explored it for several miles, and gave it the name St. Joseph. A Hillsdale College writer of 1922 gives it instead to La Salle, "the French discoverer, who built a fort at its mouth in 1679" — though La Salle's own documented name for the river was the River of the Miamis, not St. Joseph at all. Both attributions stand in the record and are printed here as they stand; the documentary floor is the 1689 grant, in which the name already exists, attached to the mission, whoever first spoke it. One more form belongs to the survey: David E. Bartlett's county-era compilation (1904) gives a Potawatomi name for the river as "Sau-wau-see-be," softened in his telling from "Sauk-wauk-sil-buck," with a legend of its own attached — printed here as Bartlett's account, at his strength, beside the documented Sheggwe rather than merged with it. The county took the river's name when the legislature created St. Joseph County in 1830, as the Story of South Bend section records; the city took the bend's.

Sources:

1. The river's Miami-Illinois name and gloss (saakiiweesiipiiwi / Sakiwäsipi, "Outlet River") as carried in the river's reference record and the Myaamia scholarship cited there.
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "Wondering Out Loud: Saint Joseph River" — Sheggwe and its meaning per Gregory Dowd, John Palmer of the St. Joseph County Public Library, and the Northern Indiana Center for History; La Salle's Miami River; the 1689 land grant as the earliest "Saint Joseph River" reference found, for Mission Saint Joseph near present Niles.
3. Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (1925) — the name chain: River of the Miamis, then "St. Joseph's river of the Lakes," then St. Joseph's, then St. Joseph.
4. The naming attributions in conflict: the Hillsdale County history of 1879 (Marquette, 1673) and Turrell (1922) (La Salle), as compiled in the river's headwaters literature.
5. This record's Folklore section — Sheggwe's legend whole, cross-referenced; and its Spine — the county's naming, cross-referenced.