The paved fishing floor: sturgeon at Fort St. Joseph

The French and Miami era, as the county histories preserve it

The fishing place: The oldest engineered thing in this county's animal record is a fish trap. Howard's history, quoting Charles H. Bartlett's Tales of Kankakee Land, describes the river at Fort St. Joseph — the French post a mile above present Niles, Michigan, ten or twelve miles below South Bend, Michigan ground printed here because the river and its fish are the same river and the same fish that ran past this county's shore: "at a place where the waters were shallow, the aborigines had paved a strip of the river's bed from shore to shore with great slabs of limestone… thereby the people might more easily take the great fish with which the river at certain seasons was fairly alive. The canoes were accustomed to go up stream some miles, and then, descending in an open line that reached from bank to bank, so agitated the waters as to drive before them the finny game. Companions, who in the meantime had taken their stations at frequent intervals across the limestone floor, stood with uplifted spears awaiting the moment when the form of the rolling sturgeon or the catfish or the swift pickerel or the quick-darting pike should be outlined against the underlying pavement." Bartlett's witnesses, Howard adds, left the record "that when the spearmen were at work, the boats went frequently to the shore and were often weighted down to the water's edge with the burden of fishes."

The village it fed: On the west bank there stood the Miami town that Howard, on Bartlett's authority, calls one of the famous fishing grounds of the region — "this part of the stream was one of the famous fishing grounds," its site held "by many races through many ages past" — with a Potawatomi village across the river, drawn, Howard says, "no doubt by the same cause." The sturgeon is named first among the speared fish, and the passage is the river's earliest written fish record: a spring fishery, worked communally, on a run of large fish coming up out of Lake Michigan. The modern sturgeon entry below picks the same fish up three centuries later, between the dams.

Sources:

1. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Vol. 1 (1907), pp. 40, 45–46 — the Miami fishing village (citing Bartlett, Tales of Kankakee Land, p. 158) and the paved fishing floor (citing Tales of Kankakee Land, pp. 158–9).