The drift: the Kankakee outwash plain

THE CARRIED GROUND

The ground itself is meltwater's leavings: the ice that crossed this county came in lobes — the Michigan lobe down the lake basin, the Saginaw lobe from the northeast, the Huron-Erie lobe from the east — and their meeting over the county is the glacial frame dug at full strength in the South Bend, Mishawaka and Granger legs, pointed to here. This ground's share of that frame is the Kankakee outwash plain: the broad sluiceway flat the meltwater laid westward from the ice margins, a plain, in Professor John L. Campbell's survey measurement, from one to twenty miles wide, "of sand and gravel" in its ridges and water-covered in its bottoms, its fall so slight — about a foot to the mile, 1.3 feet to the mile on the river reach through this county — that water stood on it rather than ran (Campbell's Kankakee survey of 1882, reprinted in Howard, pp. 245–252). Campbell's own reading of the plain's two counties is this ground's glacial statement at first hand: the portions in St. Joseph County carry an admixture of clay in their uplands and are the better farmland; the sand ridges that border and cross the plain stood as islands in the marsh — the "sand islands" of the early record. The townsite itself stood on the plain's settled edge: when C. W. N. Stephens built on it in 1854 he found it "covered with a dense thicket" (Chapman, pp. 733–735) — upland growth, not marsh — while a few miles west the bottoms lay under water in every wet season into living memory. The drift chose the townsite twice: once in laying dry ground where a town could stand, and once in laying the marsh whose drainage would make the township rich enough to need one.