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THE FRAME · THE RIVER THAT NAMES THE CITY
The pair: Indiana has two St. Joseph Rivers, and they are not the same river. South Bend's rises at Baw Beese Lake in Hillsdale County, Michigan — within five miles, the federal watershed record notes, of the headwaters of the other St. Joseph, 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. This one runs southwest into Indiana, 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, and empties into Lake Michigan at the harbor of St. Joseph, Michigan, a city that shares the river's name. The confusion between the two St. Josephs runs through the whole literature of both cities; the Rivers section of this history is about the western one, and says so on its first page.
Sources:
- The Rivers section of this history — the St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan) reference record, compiled from the U.S. Geological Survey and the federal watershed literature (the rise at Baw Beese Lake within five miles of the Maumee-basin St. Joseph's headwaters; the 4,685-square-mile watershed in fifteen counties); Otto M. Knoblock, Early Navigation on the St. Joseph River (1925), for the course in one sentence.