A history of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Volume 1, Part 6

Author: Howard, Timothy Edward, 1837-1916
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Chicago, New York, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 826

USA > Indiana > St Joseph County > A history of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Volume 1 > Part 6

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Under the weight of the ice, thousands of feet in thickness and extending over a wide territory, or from some other cause, the erust of the earth began to settle, and a depression from twelve to fifteen hundred feet below

HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.

our present level was reached. This is known as the Champlain epoch. As a consequence a milder climate prevailed and the ice with- drew to the north, leaving its load of earthy material strewn over the surface. The reces- sion was slow and interrupted, and at times stationary, the glacier laying down moraine ridges and broken ranges of hills, until finally the ice border lay north of the great lakes. The melting of this receding mountain of ice produced great floods and mighty streams. In our region the waters were car- ried to the south by four great channels, the Ohio, the Wabash, the Kankakee and the Des- plaines. Any of these streams was larger than the Mississippi of today. The flood plain of the Mississippi itself was then formed as we now find it, thirty miles in breadth.

The time which elapsed after the surface was laid down by the withdrawal of the first ice-sheet, is measured by so long a period of aerial and aqueous erosion that hills and ridges were leveled and the lakes filled with sediment and vegetation. During this Cham- plain epoch, or period of depression, the surface abounded in shallow pools, swamps and lagoons. Drainage was slow and inter- rupted, with a general inclination to a level- ing of the surface. The great gorges and stream channels that had been eroded during the period of elevation were filled with river drift. Forests again covered the uplands and peat bogs filled the depressions, all again to be crushed, ground and scraped from the sur- face by the last ice advance.

VII. THE GREAT KANKAKEE.

SEC. 1 .- THREE GREAT ICE LOBES .- We now come to the culmination of the physical ener- gies which gave us the present surface con- tour of St. Joseph county. The conditions necessary to produce a humid atmosphere and great snowfalls were again present. Over the regions north of the great lakes the mass of snow and ice began again to accumulate until it reached thousands of feet in thickness, and from its own weight began to move as a te-

nacious, semi-liquid mass. As it approached and entered the great lake basins its onward movement was directed largely by the trend or direction of their basins. The Maumee or Erie lobe took a west southwest course. The lobe passing through the Huron basin made its exit in part from the southwest margin through that part of the basin known as Sagi- naw Bay. The lobe that entered the Lake Michigan basin passed almost directly south. When we speak of the direction of the several lobes we refer to their axes, as the ice move- ment in those great basins was forward and to either side, radiating in an advance direc- tion from a common center. The Saginaw lobe was a long wedge-shaped mass, hemmed in on the west by the mighty Michigan lobe and on the east receiving the full force of the Matunee or Erie mass. A part of the Saginaw lobe passed out at the foot of the basin and commingled its ice and load of earth and bowlders with the Erie lobe. From this fact we find drift material from Lake Superior and the northern Huron regions, such as drift copper and porphyry conglomer- ate, scattered over Indiana and Ohio. This may also account for the very heavy deposit of drift over the northeastern counties of In- diana, where it attains a depth in places of from four to five hundred feet.

These ice tongues or lobes, after emerging from their basins maintained their lobate characteristics, yet were united one with an- other. The most southerly line reached by the ice during this last movement was com- paratively but a few miles below the great lakes, where it remained for a long period. The ice advancing with its load of earthy refuse from the north melted away as rapidly as it advanced to this line and laid down its burden of accumulated material, forming great ranges of hills or moraines, both termi- nal and lateral, definitely marking the outline of each glacial lobe. After the summers be- gan again to predominate over the winters the ice gradually withdrew to the north and disappeared from this locality. North of the

HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.

terminal moraine marking the farthest ad- vance of the ice-sheet will be found almost all of our small inland lakes, the distinguish- ing mark of beauty of this locality. The former lakes which once dotted the older glaciated surface had long before been carried away by erosion or filled up with silt. Before the coming of this last ice the surface soil of Indiana was composed of clay and fine sand, with lime. slate and sandstone pebbles; no granite bowlders or pebbles at that time were present. It was entirely through the agency of the last ice-sheet that they were carried from the north and spread over this locality.

The Maumee or Erie ice lobe advanced from the Lake Erie basin in a southwesterly course, and the border of the lobe entered Indiana at the northeast corner of Elkhart county and took a westerly course through the northerly part of Elkhart and St. Joseph counties to a point about five miles west of South Bend where it began to angle to the south through the western part of the county and continued along the western borders of Marshall and Fulton counties and on to the Wabash river at Logansport. The withdrawal of the ice-sheet from this line and the deposit- ing of its earthy and stony contents mark the age of the lofty range of hills lying south of Mishawaka and South Bend. To the west, the Lake Michigan lobe filled its basin and ex- tended east from thirty to forty miles beyond the present shore line, where it curved south- west around the southeast corner of the lake. It overlapped the northwest corner of St. Jo- seph county and approached near to the city limits of South Bend. The highlands along the north bank of the Kankakee valley, Port- age Prairie and the uplands west of the city of Niles mark the eastern or southeastern border of the Michigan ice lobe. The Saginaw glaeier advaneed from the Huron basin, pushed south between the Michigan and Maumee or Erie glaeiers and reached a point one mile northeast of South Bend, its moraine commeneing about one mile east of Notre Dame and a little south, forming the range of hills

beginning at that point and extending in a general northeasterly direction, passing near Dowagiae, Decatur and Lawton, Michigan, and terminating west and north of Saginaw Bay. This range of hills marks the western and part of the southern terminal moraine of the Saginaw glacier, its eastern arm and part of its southern arm having been eroded and washed away by the great Kankakee river. From this outline of the glacial bor- ders, it will be noticed that the city of South Bend is located where three great ice lobes met, the Maumee or Erie, the Saginaw and the Michigan. These great lobes here marked their existence by massive accumulations, forming rugged and permanent ranges of hills and uplands which fix the contour of the landscape in St. Joseph county perhaps for- ever.

SEC. 2 .- THE ANCIENT WATERWAYS .- This brings us to the ancient waterways of our county. The melting of the vast fields of ice brought on great floods and torrential streams. South Bend and St. Joseph county being peculiarly located as to the three glaciers, were also peculiarly located as to ancient streams. Where the busy city now lies nestling in a beautiful valley, partly sur- rounded by hills, a wonderful river once flow- ed, a stream three miles wide and one hun- dred feet or more in depth. moving from east to west. From the north also a great tribu- tary, whose mouth was three miles wide, emptied its waters into the main stream with- in the present limits of the city of South Bend. If a man could have stood upon the hills of Rum Village, just south of the city, a vast panorama of water would have met his gaze. To the northeast, a flood from five to six miles in width and extending up the val- ley as far as the eye could reach, would have been seen, passing at his feet and rolling on- ward to the southwest. confined only by the hills on the north and on the sonth. To the northwest, he would perceive a tributary stream entering the great flood, three miles in width and limited in the line of vision only

HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPHI COUNTY.

by the horizon. And if a man today should stand on the same hills of Rum Village, or on those to the south of the city of Mishawaka, or upon Lowell Heights, or upon any other high- lands on either side of the great valley, he could still see the broad bed, miles in width, through which the ancient river once flowed.

The great stream was the Kankakee of that day, which had its origin at the foot of the Saginaw glacier and received its tributaries from the Maumee and the Michigan glaciers. The great Kankakee was the outlet for the waters flowing southwest from Lake Huron, through Saginaw Bay. We know that this valley served as a waterway during the with- drawal of the first ice-sheet from the fact that its channel was silted up like all other valleys during the Champlain epoeh, or age of de- pression. It was never re-excavated to any extent, and remains today a filled valley. It is probable that the Kankakee valley also carried the waters flowing from the northeast during the advance of the last glacier; but, soon after the withdrawal of this ice-sheet began, the waters found an outlet into Lake Michigan, leaving the Kankakee valley at the point where South Bend now stands, and pass- ing to the lake through the large tributary already referred to. The old valley of the great Kankakee extends from a point in Illi- nois where the present Kankakee and the Desplaines unite, northeasterly through Illi- nois, Indiana and Michigan to the watershed between the streams flowing into Saginaw Bay and the headwaters of the present St. Joseph river. The St. Joseph now flows south- westerly through this old Kankakee channel to South Bend, and there turns abruptly north and reaches Lake Michigan at the eity of St. Joseph. The valley of the Kankakee was the chief outlet to Lake Huron during glacial times, as the Wabash valley was Lake Erie. The flood plain, where onee flowed this mighty Kankakee, varies in width from three miles at its narrowest point, which is one mile below South Bend, to about twenty at its broadest, which is between Porter and Lake counties

on the north and Newton and Jasper on the south. The southeasterly bank of the valley, from about six miles below South Bend to its source, near Saginaw Bay, is from fifty to one hunded feet high, while the northwesterly bank, from South Bend to the same point, is generally low and shelving. From South Bend down the valley to the Illinois line, that is, from the point where the great stream emerged, between the Maumee and Michigan moraines, to its confluence with the Desplaines, the banks are low, generally not exceeding fifteen or twenty feet in height. . On the southeasterly side of the old channel will be found quite an extensive sandy flood plain, extending from the border of the Maumee moraine southwestward. covering al- most the entire surface of Starke county to- gether with the northern part of Pulaski, Jasper and Newton counties. On the north the main channel largely borders on the Michigan moraines.

The great width of the stream from South Bend to the eastern part of Illinois was ow- ing to three causes :

First. The surface of the country through which this part of the stream flowed was des- titute of rugged features.

Second. The stream, just beyond the pres- ent Illinois line, crossed the arehed bed roek which extends in a northwesterly course aeross Indiana into Illinois. Near the present site of Momenee, Illinois, this roeky ridge pro- duced a well marked rapids, similar to that in the Ohio river near Louisville, which tended to dam the waters and cause them to overflow a wide territory above and causing this region to appear today as if a great lake had occupied the territory.

Third. At the present site of South Bend. the Dowagiae, a tributary one-third the size of the main stream, was added to its volume.

The principal tributaries of the great Kan- kakee were the Elkhart and Yellow rivers, draining from the Maumee glacier, also the Tippecanoe at the point where it enters the southeast corner of Starke county ; besides,

HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.

the stream here called the great Dowagiac, now represented by the Dowagiae creek, which heads south of Kalamazoo, but whose ancient waters probably accumulated far north of that point, gathering from the slope of the eastern lateral moraine of the Michi- gan glacial lobe. Those waters formed a mighty glacial river, flowing south to a point three miles north of Niles. Michigan, where it received a tributary which had opened a way through the lateral Michigan moraine and discharged its waters from the Michigan basin before these waters had found an open- ing to the south between the Michigan ice- lobe and its moraine. The great Dowagiac, after receiving these overflow waters from the Lake Michigan basin, continued south and emptied into the Kankakee at the pres- ent site of the city of South Bend.

The old channel of the Dowagiac where that stream emptied into the Kankakee is three miles wide, with well defined banks rising from fifty to seventy-five feet above the bed of the valley, which had been out to bed rock and silted up about one hundred and twenty feet, leaving the above mentioned banks yet remaining. These great streams, the Kankakee and the Dowagiac, existed for long periods of time. They conveyed the glacial waters during the advance of the ice- sheet, also during the period that it stood at its most advanced point and during its withdrawal, until the Michigan ice-lobe had sufficiently receded to allow the waters along its eastern border to escape through the Des- plaines opening. This escape by the Des- plaines promoted a rapid lowering of the waters between the ice-lobe and its lateral moraine and terminated the flow of waters from the Michigan basin into the Dowagiac river, leaving a broad, water-worn plain lead- ing from the Dowagiac river back northwest- erly to Lake Michigan.

SEC. 3 .- ORIGIN OF THE ST. JOSEPHI RIVER. -Here began a system of river robbing, if we may call it so. The Dowagiac. at a point just below Niles, doubled upon itself at an

angle of forty-five degrees, followed the aban- doned channel of its former tributary and discharged its waters into Lake Michigan ; leaving in turn, a well worn channel from three to four miles wide and thirteen miles long leading to the great trunk stream, or Kankakee, at South Bend. The distance from South Bend, the point where the Do- wagiac had formerly emptied its waters into the great Kankakee, to St. Joseph, Michigan, is thirty-eight miles, with a fall of one hun- dred and forty-one feet. From South Bend to Momence, Illinois, the distance is ninety- two miles with a fall of ninety-three feet. It can be readily understood that with the first annual flood a part of the waters of the Kankakee would follow the abandoned Dowagiae channel, from South Bend to Niles, there mingle with the Dowag- iae in its new route and pass onward into Lake Michigan, at the city of St. Joseph. The fall over the new route being three and a half times greater than over the old, the new channel would rapidly ent through the old river deposit, finally taking all the waters of the once mighty Kankakee. and leaving the valley from South Bend to the Des- plaines a geological monument to tell of the eternal past.

A physical force which most likely aided in turning the current of the Kankakee into the channel of the Dowagiae, and so forming the stream known to us as the St. Joseph. re- sulted from an ice gorge formed seven miles below South Bend, where a point of land jut- ting out from the Michigan moraine, and now called Crum's Point, extends into the valley proper two miles and a half in an almost transverse direction. Just below this point we find an ancient flood plain two miles wide which was supplied with overflow water from the basin of Lake Michigan, but which over- flow entirely subsided when the waters of the lake receded from the rim of this basin. This valley, extending to and including the beauti- ful Terre Coupee Prairie, is now drained by a small meandering stream known as Grape-

IHISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.

vine creek, the remnant of a once mighty glacial river. Strong and pronounced evi- dences of an ice gorge or dam having formed at Crum's Point and extended up the river to the mouth of the old Dowagiac at South Bend are yet plainly visible from the scouring, leveling and erosion of morainie hills on the south, and by a chain of lakes and lake beds on the north, the latter connected by a gorge with the glacial stream aforesaid. Evidences of the gorge are also found at the head and north of the ice dam, which passed well up above the mouth of the Dowagiac, east and north of which the waters pouring around this dam into the Dowagiac valley excavated an in- terrupted channel or chain of depressions. These depressions are linear, extending from southeast to northwest, being from one-fourth to three-fourths of a mile long, twenty to forty feet deep and from two hundred to four hundred yards wide, with sharp and well-defined banks. They all show evidences of having been filled with water for a long period of time. All have become dry except the lower two, the Notre Dame lakes, which contain from twenty to thirty feet of water at present. This channel or chain of depres- sions extends from near Mishawaka, north- westerly, to a point on the St. Joseph river one mile north of South Bend, a distance of four miles and a half. When the ice-dam gave way the waters abandoned those circuit- ous or temporary routes and returned to their former channels; only the smaller part, how- ever, continuing down the old Kankakee, while the larger body moved along the new route through the Dowagiac channel to Lake Michi- gan. The fall by the latter way being three and a half times greater than by the former, a channel sufficient to carry the entire body of water was soon eroded. A bluff twelve to fourteen feet high, formed at first as a sandbar from sediment supplied by what is now known as the Wenger creek, extended in a diagonal direction across the old Kan- kakee bed and parallel to the new current until it reached the opposite bank, when the

great Kankakee valley was sealed forever, and the upper stream became a distinct river, the beautiful St. Joseph as we know it. The sand- bar or bluff referred to, and which thus fin- ally sealed up the valley of the great Kan- kakee, is the shelf or hill extending diagon- ally from southeast to northwest, through the City of South Bend, on the west side of the St. Joseph. Tippecanoe place is built on the edge of this bar, which was well known to our early settlers as the Bluff. This ridge, while originally built up as a sandbar by sediment from the creek, was increased in height by erosion as the new St. Joseph cut into its bed.

Long before those great stream changes had taken place, the swift current of the Do- wagiac had carried down large quantities of gravel, and as the gravel-laden waters came in contact with the waters of the Kankakee the velocity of the former was checked and the gravel was laid down on the west bank where the current remained the swiftest. This gravel bed extends north of the city limits of South Bend, down the west bank of the St. Joseph, a distance of three or four miles, and is about one-half mile in width. It forms the eastern slope or border of Port- age Prairie. The bed has been sounded in a number of places and found to be from forty to fifty feet in depth, and all smooth, rounded, water-worn gravel; placing at the city's gates an inexhaustible supply of finest road gravel. The Dowagiae hurling its great volume of water against the current of the Kankakee, also had the effect of slowing the latter stream and causing it to deposit its heavier material; which we find stored away in the form of acres of river gravel at Twin Branch. just east of Mishawaka. The east side of the Dowagiae near its mouth was much more obstructed than the west, and con- sequently the gravel and coarser material were slowly laid down farther above and only the finer material was carried down to the mouth, where it was laid down in great quantities of sand, forming Lowell Heights.

THE

1. U.

LAKE MICHIGAN

St Joseph River

.-.

Overflow Valley from Lake Michigan

Modern flood plain

Dowagial Creen Modern Flood Plain

Overflow from Michigan Basin

Depr

KankaK

Modern VITEy"

Mishand

St Joseph CoLine

Kannance Valley

Modern Kannance River

North Liberty

WatKarteA

GEOLOGICAL MAP OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, INDIANA.

Old Valley

Grape Vine Creek

MICHIGAN

St Joseph River

Old Dowagiac Rw

HISTORY OF ST. JOSEPH COUNTY.

If a careful examination is made of the sand on these heights, numerous small partieles of coal will be found, indicating that the Sagi- naw glacier had eut deep into the surface and uncovered in places the coal fields of Michigan and mingled their contents with the drift.

The great Kankakee river, from its source rear Saginaw Bay, took a southwesterly course to its junction with the Desplaines, forming with the latter the Illinois river. When the waters left the old channel at the point where the city of South Bend now stands they took an almost due northerly course, thus forming a great bend in the new river and giving to the future county seat of St. Joseph county its name. Since the for- mation of the St. Joseph from the changes thus made in the Kankakee and the Do- wagiac, the new river has eroded its valleys from fifty to sixty feet into the old river de- posits, but has not yet reached their base level. The Kankakee valley at South Bend, where it escapes from between the Maumee and Michigan moraines, is narrowed to three miles, with high. rugged banks and no flood plain. Five miles east and up the valley from South Bend, it reaches a width of six miles, which width it holds, with slight varia- tion, until it arrives at the rim of the Saginaw basin. This end of the valley is thoroughly drained by the present St. Joseph river. There are a few peat bogs and marshes lying back from the river where the valley is broad and the modern channel well to one side. Otherwise the old valley above South Bend is one vast level sand-plain. Below South Bend, where the old valley remains silted up and there is no sufficient modern channel for complete drainage, the spring waters escaping from beneath the Michigan moraine, on the west, and from the foot of the Maumee, on the east, and also bubbling up from the bed of the old stream itself, as reported by Mr. William M. Whitten, when engineer in charge of the rock excavations at Momence, have caused a vast growth of peat or muek over 2

the entire valley proper. Beneath this mek bed which extends from six to ten feet in depth, is found fine sand and river gravel, as shown by excavations made in the con- struction of large ditches, twenty to sixty feet in width, six to ten feet deep and now ex- tending sixty to seventy miles below South Bend. Had the stream not changed its course at South Bend, but continued down the orig- inal valley, eroding a channel or partially clearing the old silted valley to a depth of from fifty to sixty feet, as the waters have done through their new course down the St. .Joseph, there would have been no "Kanka- kee Marsh," and all that part of the valley from South Bend to Momence would have been a vast sandy plain, covered with timber and in general appearance similar to that part of the valley above South Bend.

Through the courtesy of Dr. Montgomery, we are enabled to illustrate the foregoing geological history with the annexed map pre- pared by him, which shows the moraines and ancient valleys and rivers, with the result- ing configuration of St. Joseph county, In- diana, and vieinity.

VIII. ELEVATIONS, STRATA AND SOILS.

From the preceding history of the recent geological formations of the surface, the general character of the soils, clays, gravels and other minerals of the county, as well as that of its lakes and underground waters, is apparent. There is not an outerop of primi- tive rock in the county, the entire surface. as we have seen, being covered with gla- cial drift which will probably average two hundred feet in depth. The only place in the county where this drift has been pierced to the underlying stratified rock is at South Bend, where in boring for gas and oil a few years ago, the drift was found to be one hundred and sixty feet thick. This, how- ever, was in the valley of the St. Joseph river, seven hundred and twenty-five feet above tide, or fully one hundred and fifty feet lower than the uplands in the south-

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A history of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Volume 1, Part 6

Author: Howard, Timothy Edward, 1837-1916 Publication date: 1907 Publisher: Chicago, New York, The Lewis publishing company Number of Pages: 826

Author: Howard, Timothy Edward, 1837-1916
Publication date: 1907
Publisher: Chicago, New York, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 826