The trout and salmon river: hatchery, ladders, and the 1992 count

1970s planning to the modern fishery

The project: The modern river's most famous fish are immigrants by design. In the late 1970s the Indiana and Michigan departments of natural resources, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, conceived the St. Joseph River Trout and Salmon Project: a hatchery and five fish passage facilities that would open the lower sixty-three miles of the river, from Lake Michigan to the base of the Twin Branch Dam in Mishawaka, to the lake's migratory trout and salmon. The hatchery — the Richard Clay Bodine State Fish Hatchery, on the east side of Mishawaka, Mishawaka's ground printed here at boundary size because its fish are this river's fish — was completed in 1983, and its standing charge is the release of coho salmon and two strains of steelhead, the Skamania and the Little Manistee or Michigan strain, into the St. Joseph. Indiana's trout and salmon stocking program on the river began in 1984.

The ladders and the count: The five ladders climb the river's dams at Berrien Springs, Buchanan, and Niles in Michigan, and at Mishawaka (Central Park, built 1991) and South Bend in Indiana. The Indiana DNR's own page for the South Bend ladder, at Seitz Park, dates the whole work: "Completed in 1992, the project included the construction of five fish passage facilities and helped establish a world class trout and salmon fishery on the Indiana stretch" of the river. The first full season's measurement survives in the Michigan DNR's technical record: video monitoring in the fall of 1992 counted fish passage from 5,081 at Berrien Springs down to 3,403 at the South Bend dam, with potamodromous salmonines — the stocked steelhead and Chinook above all — making up 99.6 percent of the fish passed at the three monitored ladders. The ladder record is the honest measure of the new river: a fishery built, counted, and almost entirely composed of the introduced fish it was built for. The coho chapter opened later: Indiana first produced and stocked coho salmon into the St. Joseph in late November 2010, releasing some 11,000 young fish of about six inches at Veterans Memorial Park in South Bend — the surplus of a program that stocked 242,000 into Trail Creek and the Little Calumet the same season. The river's other stocked sport fish is the walleye, planted at Maggie's Landing in Mishawaka in biennial stockings shared between the Indiana DNR and the Michiana Walleye Association — thousands of fingerlings at a time in the documented years, bought in part with hydro-dam remediation money — a Mishawaka launch site printed here, as with the hatchery, because the fish themselves observe no city limits.

Sources:

1. Historical marker text, St. Joseph River Trout and Salmon Project (erected 2013 by the Indiana DNR), Historical Marker Database — the project's conception, partners, hatchery, and sixty-three miles.
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources — the Bodine State Fish Hatchery (completed 1983; coho and the two steelhead strains); the South Bend Fish Ladder page (project completed 1992); DNR release, 9 November 2010 (first Indiana coho stocked into the St. Joseph, ~11,000 fish at Veterans Memorial Park, South Bend); DNR program note (stocking on the river from 1984).
3. Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Technical Report 94-5 — fall 1992 video monitoring at the ladders: 3,403 fish at the South Bend dam; salmonines 99.6 percent of passage.
4. Louie Stout's Michiana outdoors columns, Michiana Outdoors News — the biennial walleye stockings at Maggie's Landing, Mishawaka (Indiana DNR and Michiana Walleye Association), printed as outdoors-press record.