The county is two watersheds wearing one name. Everything in this history that flows north reaches Lake Michigan within days; everything that flows southwest ends in the Gulf of Mexico — and the divide between the two runs through the county's middle, along the portage the first peoples used and the first road followed. This section states the county's nature at the frame the water itself uses.
The St. Joseph River, whole: the county's name, flowing home
206 MILES, OR 210 · THE RIVER AT FULL LENGTH
The river that names the county is a Michigan river on an Indiana errand. It rises in Hillsdale County, Michigan, at Baw Beese Lake — within five miles, the federal watershed record notes, of the headwaters of the other St. Joseph River, 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, and the confusion between them runs through the literature of both cities. From Baw Beese Lake the river runs southwest through the Michigan lake country, crosses into Indiana in Elkhart County, gathers the Elkhart River at Elkhart, passes Mishawaka, and comes into South Bend still flowing south — then, at the bend the city is named for, turns and runs north again, recrosses the state line into Michigan near Bertrand, passes Niles and Berrien Springs, and empties into Lake Michigan at the harbor of St. Joseph, Michigan, which shares its name. Its length prints two ways, and both stand, as the South Bend rivers record leaves them: 206 miles in the figure the river's federal reference record carries, 210 miles in other published accounts, the difference a matter of where the measurement starts and how the meanders are followed — no figure averaged here. The watershed the federal record draws for it covers 4,685 square miles in fifteen counties, eight in Michigan and seven in Indiana, with 3,742 miles of streams, and stands as the third-largest watershed draining into Lake Michigan. The county's share of the course is the river's great bend itself: the southernmost point of the whole system, the place where the water that fell as rain in Michigan turns for home — with the rapids at Mishawaka, whose making the twin city's record tells, the dams and races of both cities, and the portage at the bend's west where this river's water was carried, in the centuries before the ditch, a few miles overland into another sea's drainage entirely.
Sources: South Bend history, rivers record (the course article) — the 206- and 210-mile figures standing together, the Baw Beese Lake rise, the 4,685-square-mile watershed in fifteen counties, and Knoblock (1925) for the course in one sentence; Mishawaka history, before-the-city record — the rapids' making and the river's capture at the bend.
The carrying place: the portage where the two waters almost meet
THE COUNTY'S OLDEST PIECE OF INFRASTRUCTURE
At the bend's western edge, the county's two drainages come within a walk of each other, and for as long as people have moved through this valley they have carried their canoes across the gap: the carrying place between the St. Joseph and the headwaters of the Kankakee, the portage from which the county's oldest township takes its name. The French memoir the South Bend record cites measures it — "a portage of three leagues" to the Kankakee's source — from the Miami town that stood near its eastern end when La Salle's party arrived in December 1679; the town's exact site is not established in the sources the city pass reached, and the gap is logged there rather than pinned to a modern parcel, a discipline this section keeps. The portage's headwaters were important enough to be written into the taking itself: the Treaty of St. Joseph of 1828 begins its Indiana cession at the point on the line run in 1817 "due south of the head of the most easterly branch of the Kankakee River" — the carrying place's springs serving as a survey mark in the instrument that extinguished the title of the people who had used the path for centuries. Its successor was a public work: the Michigan Road, ceded in 1826 and built past the portage in the next decade, made the carrying place's line into the county's first through-road, as the South Bend record puts it — the road following, as roads here always have, the line the water and the divide had already drawn. The portage is printed in this section, among the county's nature, because it is a fact of the ground before it is a fact of any town: a low, wet saddle between two seas' waters, on the county's southwest side, where the continent's drainage divides within sight of the county seat's river.
Sources: South Bend history, before-the-city record — the peoples article (the Miami town near the carrying place; the French memoir's three leagues; the town site's gap logged) and the treaties article (the 1828 cession's opening call; the Michigan Road as the carrying place's successor); the portage article of the same record, pointed to whole.
The Kankakee and the divide: the county's other water, running to the Gulf
THE CONTINENTAL FACT OF THE COUNTY
The Kankakee River rises about five miles southwest of South Bend, in the marshes at the county's southwest corner — its source sections disputed at the head of the drainage section, Chapman placing it in Section 9 and Campbell's survey in Section 16 — and runs some 133 miles west and southwest across Indiana into Illinois, where it joins the Des Plaines to form the Illinois River, designated a National Water Trail in 2016. It has bounded the county's townships since they were made: Howard's printing of the board's order of 2 May 1837 runs Liberty Township's western line "west to the Kankakee River, down the river to the LaPorte county line" — the river as a boundary call, miles west of any townsite. Between the two rivers stands the fact this section exists to state: North Liberty's record puts it in one sentence — everything that rains on that town and runs west reaches the Gulf of Mexico by Potato Creek, Pine Creek and the Kankakee, "on the far side of the continental divide from the St. Joseph River its county seat stands on." The county is thus one of the few in Indiana that drains to two seas, and the divide is not a curiosity: it is why the portage existed where it did, why the Michigan Road was surveyed where it was, and why the county's land had to be ditched in two directions. The creeks are the divide's fingers: Potato Creek, named by 1849 — the Indiana Gazetteer of that year entering it as "a mill stream in the southern part of St. Joseph, runs west into the Kankakee" — flowing from a swamp into Worster Lake, out again, joining Pine Creek and then the Kankakee, its total length stated by no carrier the North Liberty history reached, the USGS National Hydrography Dataset named there as the gap's settler; Pine Creek, Walkerton's own water; and Juday Creek on the north side, Granger's and Indian Village's stream, running to the St. Joseph. Even the marsh the county unmade was surveyed as water before it was land: Campbell's 1882 stations touch the ground at a bridge "through the west part of Mud Lake," a lake that survives in the drainage record as a station call. The federal mussel survey of the basin (Wilson and Clark, Bureau of Fisheries, 1912, read first-hand in the North Liberty pass) caught the system's nature before the dredges finished: Potato Creek "being undredged, it still preserves those alternations of swift and sluggish current, deep and shallow water, coarse and fine bottom, which are conducive to mussel life" — the county's undrained remnant, described by the government in the act of counting what the drainage was about to take.
Sources: North Liberty history, rivers record — the Kankakee at its true frame (133 miles, the 1837 boundary call, the divide sentence), Potato Creek whole (the 1849 gazetteer, the Worster Lake course, the 1912 mussel survey quoted, the length gap with its settler named); Walkerton history, land record — Pine Creek, the marsh and Campbell's Mud Lake station; Granger and Indian Village histories, land records — Juday Creek as each ground's own water.