The working river: keelboats, steamboats, and the lock that leaked

1831 TO 1911

For the city's first twenty years, everything came by water: Until the railroad reached South Bend in 1851, every barrel of merchandise in its stores and every emigrant's household goods arrived up this river, and the record of that traffic is Knoblock's 1925 history, built on the first-hand account of Lee P. Johnson, whose father built the first boat. Canoes had carried the fur trade for a century and a half before him; the organized freight business begins in 1831, when Peter Johnson, a South Bend carpenter, bought a French trader's pirogue at Niles, split it lengthwise, and rebuilt it as the keelboat Fairplay — forty feet long, six feet wide, with running boards along each side for the polemen, built in his shipyard at the foot of Washington Street.

The year after came the first real cargo keelboat, the Antelope, eighty feet on the keel, built in the street in front of Johnson's shop and dragged to the water by "the whole male population" over a corduroy road Johnson built through the swamp — the dragging of the Antelope being, Knoblock notes, the first attempt to grade what is now East Washington Street. The Comet followed the same year. Captain Boyd of Mishawaka added the boats the river men called the Red Dogs, distinguished by number rather than name, and by 1833 a fleet of ten or eleven keelboats, some of them eighty feet by seven carrying 350 barrels of flour, worked between Three Rivers and the lake. The named fleet of the whole era, as Knoblock's roster preserves it, ran to twenty-five boats: Fairplay, Antelope, Comet, White Pigeon, Mason, Ottawa, Three Brothers, Swallow, Red Bird, Odd Fellow, Buena Vista, Rover, Racer, Dolphin, Diamond, Empire, Gem, Ruby, Goshen, Cass and South Bend among them.

The trade's measure survives in one figure: in 1832, 10,000 barrels of merchandise were landed at the river's mouth for shipment up to towns like this one. Up the river came store goods and emigrants' property; down it went grain, pork, flour, hides, furs, whiskey, and the pig iron of Mishawaka's furnaces — Mishawaka's product on South Bend's water, boundary-printed as her own. Alexis Coquillard, the town's leading merchant, tried to scale the trade up in 1842 with a boat called the South Bend, built for him at Fort Wayne by a canal-boat builder; she drew too much water for the river's riffles and bars, made one round trip, and was laid up. The keelboats were worked by crews of seven to nine men, poled up against the current from the running boards — Knoblock preserves the crew's shoulder callouses, the captain steering from the stern sweep, and the boats lying up at night lashed to the bank, the men sleeping ashore under the overturned pirogue kept for the purpose.

The steamboat era at the bend was short, real, and argued about: The first steamboat to try the river, the Newburyport in 1832, got only as far as Berrien Springs, grounded, and was brought back down damaged. The boat that made it was the Matilda Barney, a flat-bottomed stern-wheeler built at St. Joseph by Deacon and McCaleb, her hull carpentry by Joseph Fisbay, her engine by P. B. Andrews of that village, Captain David Wilson commanding and Leveret Plum at the engine. Knoblock's account, from men who were there, puts her first appearance early in the summer of 1833 and gives it at the size of a civic holiday: the printer's-office boys raced the boat from McCartney's Creek, the captain turned her nose onto the sand at the foot of Washington Street as the whole town watched, and a hundred passengers went to dinner at Peter Johnson's Michigan Hotel.

She ran regularly afterward, towing strings of two to five keelboats behind her, and a rival, the Davy Crockett, was brought from the lake in 1834 to run against her; a South Bend verse-maker of that year left the rivalry in rhyme, and the rivalry's end, when the Matilda Barney, snagged and with her wheel broken, was towed home to St. Joseph lashed alongside her competitor. The later freight steamers on the river, in Knoblock's full list, were the Pocahontas, Algona, Indiana, Mishawaka, John F. Porter, Michigan, Niles, Niles Jr., St. Joseph, Union City, Pilot, Magnolia, King Brothers, Kakota, Schuyler Colfax, May Graham, Constantino, Albany, Diamond and Kalamazoo; a writer of 1847, quoted by Knoblock, reckoned steamboats then navigated 175 river-miles from Union City to St. Joseph, "a length of steamboat navigation greater even than the Hudson," with four boats then plying.

The date of the Matilda Barney's famous arrival does not stand single in the record: the state's own History of Indiana (1922), citing the Western Sun of 31 May 1834, describes the same celebrated trip — a hundred passengers, ten tons of freight, a draft of thirteen inches — as an event of 1834, a year after Knoblock's participants put it. The two tellings stand side by side here as they stand in the record; the boat, the crowd and the dinner are not in dispute, only the year.

The dam killed the navigation, and the lock meant to save it leaked: When the South Bend Manufacturing Company dammed the river in 1844, the river was by law a navigable stream as far as Three Rivers, Michigan, so the company built a lock into the work — on the west side at the foot of Washington Street, opening into the west race. The lock was the navigation's death certificate anyway. Its gates were faulty and leaked; it was so shallow that the heavier boats had to be dragged through it, the captain whistling to collect enough citizens to haul the boat through on ropes. It killed at least once: in the summer of 1859 a Red Dog keelboat passing into the head of the west race met a hawser stretched across below the head gates, and the steersman, a man named Trimble, was caught against the cargo and his back broken; he died at once.

The lock fell out of use, its gates rotted and were bulkheaded with earth, and when the city built its water works the old lock chamber served as the tail race for the water wheels; in February 1894 it was filled in entirely, "and every vestige of it removed." Congress had been asked for help with the river as early as 1832 — mass meetings at St. Joseph, Berrien Springs and Niles petitioned it — and again in 1845 and 1846, and St. Joseph County's delegates went to the great Chicago River and Harbor Convention of 1847; nothing came of any of it. The end was formal: in 1879 a party of government engineers surveyed the river from Elkhart to its mouth and reported against making it navigable, and, in Knoblock's closing phrase, "the river was given over to power production." What ran after that was pleasure: four excursion steamers — the Condon, the Ben Hamilton, the Tourist, and the J. C. Knoblock, built in 1882, later renamed Vandalia, carrying 800 to 1,000 passengers on moonlight runs over the four-mile stretch between South Bend and Mishawaka — and one working boat: the May Graham, last of the freight and passenger steamers, which ran between St. Joseph and Berrien Springs until her withdrawal in 1908, and was taken up the Grand River in 1911 to end her days on Michigan water. The landing the whole trade used, before the dam, stands in the record as Chapin's warehouse — the old red warehouse at the foot of Colfax Avenue, on the west side just south of the present La Salle Avenue bridge.

Sources:

1. Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1925) — substantially the whole entry: the Fairplay (1831), the Antelope and the grading of East Washington Street, the Comet, the Red Dogs, the 1833 fleet, the complete keelboat and freight-steamer rosters, the 10,000 barrels of 1832, Coquillard's South Bend (1842), the poled crews and their working detail, the Newburyport (1832), the Matilda Barney and her 1833 arrival, the Davy Crockett rivalry and the 1834 verses, the 1847 writer's 175 miles, the petitions and the 1847 convention, the 1844 lock and its leaks, the Trimble death (1859), the lock's filling (February 1894), the 1879 engineers' survey, the excursion steamers and the J. C. Knoblock (1882), the May Graham (withdrawn 1908, Grand River 1911), and the Chapin warehouse landing.
2. Logan Esarey, A History of Indiana (1922), citing the Western Sun, 31 May 1834 — the Matilda Barney's arrival carried as an event of 1834, with 100 passengers, ten tons of freight, and a thirteen-inch draft; printed as the conflicting dating, unreconciled.