#179 — The river's fish: Chapman's list, the sturgeon between the dams, and the managed river

Chapman's fish list is the shortest in his chapter, and its most important fact is an absence: the fishes of St. Joseph County in 1880, as he gives them, are the black bass, goggle-eye, crappie ("big black sun-fish") and two common sunfish of the "sickle-backed" game family; two of the pike family, the pickerel "weighing from five to twenty-five pounds" and the gar pike; the sucker family whole — buffalo, red-horse, white sucker, two black suckers and "mullet" — "found in all the streams of the county; they abound wherever there is water"; the channel catfish, mud catfish and two small catfish, "from one to thirty pounds," with the bullhead "yet abundant"; and, besides, chub, silver-sides, freshwater herring and minnows in "the smallest spring branches." No sturgeon is named. That silence cannot carry a verdict by itself — Chapman's list is a sportsman's and table list, not a survey — but it stands in print beside the big river's own record, and the contrast is the article's spine.

The lake sturgeon's St. Joseph River record is a Michigan-reach record that used to run the whole river. Historically the migrating natives of the river included lake sturgeon among redhorse, walleye, lake trout, whitefish and pike; sturgeon once migrated as far up as Hillsdale County, Michigan, and the abundance around Niles, Michigan — one dam-reach above the Indiana line — "made the area famous in the mid-to late-1800s," fish "up to 12 feet long and 300 pounds" taken and their roe exported as caviar, in the river history's telling. The dams ended the run: 190 dams stand in the watershed, 17 on the mainstem, and spawning sturgeon now "rarely reach Niles, as they are impeded by the dam at Berrien Springs," cutting some 155 miles off the river they can use. The fish ladders built for salmon do not pass them — the ladders "are not adequate for many native species, such as sturgeon," and 94 percent of what passes the completed ladders is salmon and trout. For Lincoln Township the verdict is structural, and prints as such: the township's own river is the Kankakee, not the St. Joseph mainstem; the sturgeon is a fish of the county's big river, stopped below the county, and no sturgeon record for the township's Kankakee reach was found — the great fish stands in this section at county-river size, between the dams, exactly where the record keeps it.

The managed river begins on a date: Indiana's trout and salmon program on the St. Joseph River began in 1984, on the DNR's own statement in its 2010 coho stocking release — fish produced at Bodine and Mixsawbah state fish hatcheries, the Bodine hatchery being the program's seat on this river at Mishawaka. The passage works were built in stages up the lower dams: Michigan's Berrien Springs ladder in 1975 carried the runs ten more miles to Buchanan; by 1992 completed ladders on the lowest five mainstem dams extended salmonid passage to the Twin Branch Dam in Mishawaka — 63 river miles from Lake Michigan — which is the "1992" the audit's count test points at. A dated count, at the strength the current record carries it.

The Kankakee has its own fish record, and it is a survey record. Indiana DNR first surveyed the basin in 1971 (75 species, 14 families, in the 2005 Indiana report's summary of Robertson's work); about 2,000 fish of 48 species were examined in the 1981-reported survey; a 1986 nongame-funded seining program at 89 stations found 67 species, and Seegert concluded the Indiana basin held at least 77 species in 1985. The Illinois basin surveys that run the mainstem down from this river's headwaters give the modern measure: 76 species in 2005, with smallmouth bass the most numerous species on the mainstem at its highest recorded catch rate, and no Asian carp collected; 74 native and three non-native species in 2020, smallmouth again the leading game fish, walleye catch rising under an Illinois stocking program begun in 2000 — and again, in the survey's own words, "No Asian Carp were observed or collected." The channelized Indiana reach is the township's reach; the fish record for it is a bass, catfish and panfish fishery riding on a 77-species basin, printed at basin strength because the surveys sample stations, not townships.

Sources: Chapman (1880), p. 344; St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan) watershed and dam record, with its cited state sources (97 native species historically in the basin; ladders completed 1992; sturgeon at Berrien Springs); Indiana DNR, 2010 St. Joseph River coho stocking release (program began 1984; Bodine and Mixsawbah hatcheries); Indiana DNR fishing report, 15 October 2026, as summarized in the Gillnet news desk (about 800 steelhead through South Bend since 1 September 2026); Indiana DNR, Fishery, Habitat, and Recreational Use Surveys for the Kankakee River, Indiana (January 2005); Pescitelli & Rung, 2005 Kankakee basin survey (2008) and the 2020 Kankakee basin survey (2021). Closure: MIXED — baseline, sturgeon, program and Kankakee survey record DUG; the 1992 first-season ladder counts are a NAMED GAP, settler: the Indiana/Michigan fish-ladder passage reports for the 1992 season (DNR Lake Michigan fisheries records, Bodine station).