The bend and the portage

THE GEOGRAPHIC PREMISE

Everything here is downstream of one bend: The St. Joseph River comes down out of the Michigan lake country flowing south and southwest, and at this place it makes the southernmost turn of its whole course — the great bend for which the city is named — and starts back north toward Lake Michigan, where it empties at the Michigan harbor that shares its name. The town, and then the city, grew up on the banks at the bend's crest, at the divide between two of the continent's watersheds: behind it, the St. Lawrence system and the lakes; ahead of it, the Mississippi. The Indiana Writers' Project's 1941 guide put the position exactly: South Bend lies "at the crest of the watershed dividing the St. Lawrence basin from the basin of the Mississippi."

The reason the crest matters is the portage. A short carry west from the bend — about four miles of prairie and wet ground, by the accounts of those who measured it — reached the headwaters of the Kankakee River, which runs southwest to join the Des Plaines and form the Illinois, and so to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. It was the shortest overland link between the Lake Michigan drainage and the Mississippi system anywhere in the region, and it was travelled for centuries: by the Native peoples of the valley first, then by French explorers, missionaries and traders, and it fixed the site of every settlement that followed. The landing on the river and the trail across the divide ran through what is now the city's northwest side, along the line Portage Avenue still keeps in its name. A few miles downriver stands Mishawaka, the twin city of the later factory age; it is a separate city with a history of its own, and where its works and wages touch this record they are named as Mishawaka's and left there.

Sources:

1. Indiana Writers' Project, Indiana: A Guide to the Hoosier State (Federal Writers' Project, 1941) — the watershed-crest description of the site, carried in the National Register documentation for the city.
2. City of South Bend and St. Joseph County reference record — the river's southernmost bend as the source of the name, and the portage as the shortest overland route from the St. Joseph to the Kankakee.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau and Indiana Bicentennial Commission county materials — the portage route of about four miles between the rivers.