(♪) The St. Joseph River has long provided for the people who call its banks home, We say that water is medicine, water is life, and we believe in honoring the spirit of that water.

When you're beside the river, you have what you need to sustain life.

From furs to fruit, the bounty of the St. Joseph Valley has always attracted life.

The river is what drew us here.

If it wasn't here, we wouldn't be here, including the animals and trees and plants.

And thanks to a fate of geology, the St. Joseph served as a critical gateway to the continent.

The Portage Path that connected the St. Joe with the Kankakee River.

You can traverse a third of the United States by using that five mile path.

It just happened to be here.

Ultimately, it would be the power of the river itself that shaped its future as it powered the industries that gave rise to the cities and towns of today.

Every town along that river is inextricably linked to the river.

Everything about that town started off because it was on that river.

But as the river gave birth to new communities, the stream began to suffer.

So it was viewed as a way to get rid of the things that we don't want.

And eventually that became the toxics that were used in the production process.

But communities that once turned their backs to the river are now embracing it.

Something snapped and changed and it was this is part of what makes our community special.

These resources that nature has to offer doesn't belong to us, it belongs to our children and their children because they're the ones that are going to need it tomorrow.

Past generations have been well served by the St. Joseph, what does the future have in store for this river, and its people?

(♪) Then, Now and Always, the St. Joseph River story is brought to you by our title sponsors, the Robbie and Pamela Rask family, recognizing the beauty and cherishing the value that the waters of the St. Joseph River bring to our region.

Community Foundation of Elkhart County.

Inspire good.

The Bill and Kristin Fenech family and Barletta Boat Company are proud to support this WNIT local production on our communities most treasured natural resource.

The original music score for Then, Now and Always, the St. Joseph River story is underwritten by a gift from Janet and Larry Thompson and by a gift from Linda and Bipin Doshi.

Additional support provided by Center for Hospice Care.

Drive and Shine.

Friends of the St. Joe River Association, bringing Indiana and Michigan together for a healthier St. Joe River.

Michigan Gateway Community Foundation, home of the Buchanan Promise.

The University of Notre Dame.

Barbara and John Phair Foundation.

Stifel with investment offices in Elkhart, South Bend and St. Joseph.

The Cascade Riverfront Development, Panzica Building Corporation and the Lauber Kitchen and Bar.

Thank you.

The St. Joe River has been part of my life since I was a little kid, you know, I grew up in a little neighborhood just a couple of blocks from the river.

We'd go down and throw rocks and we'd look for junk that would float up and and you know, so I grew up kind of going down there to play.

We started going to my family's Lake Cottage near Coldwater, Michigan, and we would cross over all kinds of little creeks and streams along the way.

And at some point I got out a map and I remember realizing that that lake that I was swimming in and water skiing was connected to the river that I had grown up playing in, and to me it seemed like two different places in the world that was so far away from each other and realized that they were connected and that that's--this thing that I grew up playing on was that big.

Folks think of the river as the channel, you know what you see as the river.

But really it's the land, it's 5000 square miles of land that are draining to the river that give the river its character.

The St. Joseph River Basin was shaped tens of thousands of years ago during the last Ice Age, when the river traveled a very different path than it does today.

flowing for thousands of years as one with the Kankakee River until erosion steadily carved out a path that redirected the waters of the St. Joseph to the north, forming a turn in the river that would give today's city of South Bend, Indiana, its name.

And as the river settled into its modern course, people ultimately came to call its watershed home.

Our tribe originated as a people on the St. Joseph River.

Our oldest story says [indigenous language].

At first, the Miami came out of the water and the water that we came out of was the St. Joseph River.

What we now know as the St. Joseph River provided an immense array of resources for its early inhabitants.

This has been considered North America's Garden of Eden, everything that you need to survive is right here.

A lot of that is tied to the water.

When you're beside the river, you have what you need to sustain life.

One plant, in particular, was bountiful and according to one oral tradition, its existence led the Potawatomi people to call the region home.

We once lived on the east coast of North America and we received visions that we had to head west and we would know we had found a new home when we came upon a place where the food grows on the water.

And so that food that grows on the water was wild rice Mnomen.

What it really is our whole purpose for being here.

So it's very significant.

It's a vital food source for the Anishinaabe people and the Potawatomi people.

This plant does all of its growth in one year.

It was something that they could harvest in the fall live off of for the whole winter time and into the spring.

Pretty awesome plant.

And over 300 years ago, the resources of the St. Joseph River lured another nation to the region, this one from across the Atlantic.

The French; a people fueled by twin desires.

(♪) They were seeking two things, making money and saving souls.

They would make money out of the fur trade.

So when you think of big global trends today, everybody wants an iPhone.

In the past, everybody wanted a beaver hat.

So the beaver fur is in great demand for making these hats.

Well, they're extinct in Europe.

And then here's North America with more beaver pelts than you can possibly imagine.

So they're moving into the Great Lakes region and trying to establish trade networks with the natives there.

Missionaries were here also and they were here for religious reasons.

They had a whole nation of people that they were looking to convert to Christianity.

One explorer was perhaps lured a bit more by treasure than by faith.

His name was Renee Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle.

He was from a wealthy French family, he studied to become a priest and got over here and preferred the adventurous life.

There was an enormous amount of money to be made in the fur trade, and he was very keen on making a lot of money.

La Salle saw the St. Joseph River as a highway to potential riches, thanks to its close proximity to the river to which it was once connected and a path that had been used by native people for generations.

He took advantage of the portage between here and the headwaters of the Kankakee River.

You can just use your canoes and get through the Great Lakes and go up this river and you can get out, take all your stuff, walk five miles through Kankakee, carry that, it'll carry you down right in the Mississippi.

You go clear down the Gulf of Mexico, you can traverse third of the United States just by using that five mile path that just happened to be here.

The river strategic importance led the French to establish Fort St. Joseph near modern-day Niles, Michigan.

The exact location of which had been lost to history.

It was the people of Niles that raised the question, where is our French fort and help us find it?

We did, actually what many other archeologists had done, we started digging around this big boulder, because it said "Fort St. Joseph" chipped on the front of it.

In between here and the river, we dug three hundred and fifty of these small holes and we found a musketball and a pipestem and some glass that looked old.

So what that told us is that had the fort been in the area we were looking, we would have found it.

And as we were packing up our equipment, getting ready to go back to Western Michigan University, a local person who had been using a metal detector showed up and he showed us his box of artifacts, and they were all 18th century French and English artifacts.

They were precisely what we'd been looking for.

We often say that it's not what you find, it's what you find out, and the archeology suggests that people could be very different from each other and they can live in fairly harmonic relationships.

You had the Potawatomi with their own worldview and then you had the French with their own world view.

But they had to somehow try to understand each other.

And they eventually created this third space where they would exist and try to help each other out the best that they could.

This delicate balance between the region's indigenous people and European traders would soon come under tremendous strain.

As bitter global conflicts determine what flag flew at Fort St. Joseph throughout the 18th century.

This terrain was being contested.

It was said that there was a time in Europe when every head of state knew exactly where Fort St. Joseph was because it was the access key to all of Central North America.

It was controlled by the At one time, it was controlled by the English.

The Spanish were there for a short while and then it wound up with the Americans.

We like to call this area the land of four flags, but really it should be more than that.

Native people unhappy with British rule came together under the Ottawa And we held that for much longer than Spain But Spain gets recognized as having, you know, a piece of that... but the Potawatomi and the Miami get forgotten about.

The heavily contested fort ultimately became part of the United States.

And gradually it was lost to the wilderness.

The river, however, remained a key highway that brought waves of new settlers to the entire river valley, settlers intent on taming the frontier.

The river was a trail and you could not move huge amounts of goods or people over land in a wagon, through deep woods.

It just wasn't going to happen.

So surveyors used the river as extensively to get into this area.

These new arrivals immediately look to the St. Joseph River and its tributaries to help their settlements thrive.

The first mill that was on this site was actually built in 1832 by a James and Robert Collins and they moved here from Pennsylvania.

Mills were very important to the early settlers because it was everything there to grow a community; lumber to build new buildings, new houses, food for people to eat.

This mill was actually the post office for a while, so they were very important.

With all the waterways that join into the St. Joe River, it was just prime for mills.

First of all, they were sawmills.

There was no need for a grain mill because we didn't have grain.

Nobody had cut the prairies open.

Then they brought in stones to mill what grain was being produced here.

Eventually, the movement of grain was huge out of this area.

Much of that lumber and grain was destined for a burgeoning new port where the river emptied into Lake Michigan.

Today's Twin Cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, which by 1843 became the most important port in Michigan outside of Detroit.

And settlers utilized a specific type of water craft to transport the bounty of the river basin down the often shallow stretches of the St. Joseph.

So there were no keels.

They were totally flat and they were built with really rough sawn timber.

According to many accounts, the men who piloted these boats were as rough as the timber of which these vessels were constructed.

Rivermen were a very unique breed of people.

They sometimes called them polemen because they would use poles to move the arcs down the rivers and maneuver them.

And they were very strong gentlemen, have a reputation of being drinkers and fighters.

Tall tales abound about these men who muscled boats up and down the St. Joseph, but maybe none so tall as the tale of Charles 'Infant' Freeman, known as the Michigan Giant, a man who by some accounts towered over seven feet tall.

As the story goes, there was a tavern owner in South Bend who made a habit of getting the rivermen so drunk that he could rob them of their wages.

Tired of being taken advantage of, the rivermen set the biggest one of them, the Michigan Giant, to teach this tavern owner a lesson.

And the Michigan Giant would go on to become a legend in the world of boxing, as he is believed to have been America's first bareknuckle world champion.

And they would go down river and the rafts were sold for timber, they used rock as ballast as well as whatever goods they were moving.

The rocks, particularly from this area, helped build the basis of buildings in South Bend and Niles.

With foundations made from riverboat ballast and walls constructed from their hulls,.

River cities began to grow and started to alter the course of the St Joseph to power their burgeoning economies.

They dug races, which are basically channels to go around a dam.

And in that channel was a turbo wheel, just a big wooden wheel.

Then it would spin and that would turn the wheels of power, if you will.

The wheels of industry.

Dams were built and races dug throughout the St. Joseph valley giving rise to many of today's communities.

From its headwaters in Michigan down to when it comes into Lake Michigan, every town along that river is inextricably linked to the river.

Everything about that town started off because it was on that river.

Many of the communities now harnessing the power of the river had their roots in the fur trade economy, which continued into the mid 19th century.

At the mouth of the river, William Burnett ran a trading post that became St. Joseph, Michigan.

Near present day Mendon, a trading post was converted into a grand house on the river by Patrick Marantette.

And near the portage between the St. Joseph and Kankakee Rivers, fur traders established what would become the watershed's largest South Bend, Indiana.

The main town founders Pierre Navarre, Lathrop Taylor, Alexis Coquillard, all fur traders originally.

The diverging paths of the city's founders personified the shifting focus of the region's economy.

Taylor and Coquillard left the fur trade to evolve into businessman who bought up most of the land that is now downtown South Bend.

Pierre Navarre, however, remained a fur trader and led a life intertwined with the region's indigenous people.

He married a Potawatomi woman.

Her name was Angelique.

They had, we think, between like 10 and 12 kids.

Pure and angelic lived along the St. Joseph in a small cabin considered South Bend's first permanent structure.

But their home, and that of so many others would be affected by actions in Washington.

In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States and he strongly believed that the continent's indigenous people could not live alongside European American settlers.

a belief contrary to certain accounts from the St. Joseph Valley.

When the white settlers came, the Native Americans helped the white settlers survive.

Those relationships could be a matter of life and death, as was the case at the site of today's Rosin's King Mill, where Jane Cowan, the wife of the mill owner, was alone with her infant during the winter of 1837.

She was in dire straits.

It was getting cold.

She was extremely sick.

The baby was sick.

She was able to flag down some passing Indians that just happened to be walking So they--they brought an abundance of wood and food and helped her until her husband returned.

And then into the summer, when the flour started being milled again, they repaid them with flour.

Nationally, however, the country was deeply divided regarding its relationship with native And in 1830, Congress debated a controversial bill known as the Indian The legislation passed in the Senate, but in the House, it underwent a furious debate where some, like Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, assaulted the bill on moral grounds.

"The evil, sir, is enormous.

The inevitable suffering, Do not stain a fair fame of the country, nations of dependent Indians, against their will, under color of law are driven from their homes into the wilderness.

And we ourselves, sir, when the interests and passions of the day are passed, will look upon it, I fear, with self reproach and a regret as bitter as unavailing."

The bill passed by a mere five votes.

and that slim margin ultimately led to the forced relocation of nearly all indigenous people east of the Mississippi to land west of the river.

But in the St. Joseph River Valley, one band of Potawatomi saw this approaching storm.

They were led by a man named Leopold Pokagon.

He got the name Pokagon, which means Rib Bone, the name referred to how he protected his people.

So if you think about ribs, they protect your most important organs.

And that's what Leopold did for Potawatomi people here.

Pokagon saw that the United States valued the private ownership of land and embraced Christianity.

So Pokagon purchased the land on which his people lived rather than trust in the common practice of residing on reserves that were guaranteed by federal treaty.

He also turned to the church to further his case.

Leopold walked all the way to the Catholic dioceses in Detroit and requested a black robe.

His name was Father Badin and Father Badin and established a very successful mission with Leopold Pokagon.

Father Stephen Badin holds the distinction as the first priest ordained in the United States and his arrival left a lasting imprint on the St. Joseph Father Badin's ultimate replacement was somebody by the name of Father Sorin.

And Father Sorin goes down in history as the founder of Notre Dame.

Although they played a role in helping to establish what would eventually become one of the region's most recognized institutions, Pokagon and his people were still in the crosshairs of the federal government.

They had a whole list of reasons why they wanted to remove us.

And Leopold said, if you look at my village, we're doing all those things you said we're incapable of doing and then some.

And so that's how this tribe was able to avoid removal.

And we stayed in our homeland where our ancestors have lived for millennia.

Still, the days of removal cast a long shadow over the entire St. Joseph At the river's headwaters, chief Baw Beese and his people were forced from the shores of the lake that bears his name.

In South Bend, one of the city's founding fathers, Pierre Navarre, accompanied his wife, Angelique, to a reservation beyond the Mississippi.

A fate shared by many.

However, some did evade federal troops to remain, while others ultimately returned to the Midwest, including members of the Miami tribe of Oklahoma and the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi, One of our first chief, John Moguago, had helped some of us escape and brought us back up here.

And all felt the impact of those trying My mom and my grandma, they didn't really practice a lot of the traditions because it was stripped away.

A lot of aspects of our culture went underground or they faded away.

Our language eventually stopped being spoken in the Our language is the pillar of who we are.

Our language defines how we understand the world.

The scars from that time are lasting and deep.

But for over 150 years, the region's Potawatomi have lived shoulder to shoulder with those who have joined them in calling the St. Joseph River Valley home.

Among those joining the Potawatomi in the St. Joseph Valley were immigrants seeking the opportunity to break free from their station in life.

One such family was that of James Oliver.

James Oliver was a Scot, and he and his family immigrated to the United States, basically poor as church mice.

And they wound up living in today what is Mishawaka.

And Oliver was looking for a job.

He was maybe 14, 15 years old.

A material found in the swamps of the river basin would set this young Scotsman on a trajectory toward international renown.

There was a thing called bog iron, and so one of the earliest businesses in the county was a foundry that took bog iron, melted it down and turned it into cast iron equipment.

And he went down and got a job in the foundry.

Oliver ultimately became a partner at a foundry on South Bend's west race.

There, he made an advancement to the common plow that helped others transform the landscape of the St. Joseph Basin and beyond.

He called it personally, he was chilling, the plowshare, the point of the plow Oliver's process made for a stronger plow that could survive tough soils.

And so he cornered the market.

At one time, the Oliver Chilled Plow Company had offices in every continent except Antarctica.

The Oliver origin story, however, is disputed upriver in Union City, where it's claimed a resident of that community was the chilled plows true inventor.

Unfortunately, he didn't get a patent on it.

And a guy named Oliver got the patent.

However, the Oliver chilled plow came to pass, its invention not only transformed agricultural land, but also the makeup of the St. Joseph Valley as Oliver's factory and other industries brought in waves of new workers.

Because the factories grew so quickly here, there weren't enough people to satisfy that labor needs.

To satisfy the demand for labor, the factories of the St. Joseph Valley welcomed people from all over the world, including Sweden, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Ireland and many other countries.

And during the Great Migration of the 20th century, many African-Americans traveled from the American South to find jobs in the St. Joseph Valley, joining black communities already well-established in the region, especially near South Bend and along the St. Joseph's tributaries in Cass County, Michigan.

This is Joseph Allen and his wife, Rebecca.

They was our original--family members who started here.

My family started out in Virginia.

They was freed by a guy that owned 51 slaves.

When he died, he freed them.

And they didn't want to stay in that area because there was nothing there for them.

There was a great movement of free blacks, mostly from North Carolina, Virginia, that were always free.

You had to leave the states if you were a free black, otherwise you would become indentured slaves.

They had 90 days to leave.

So our family came from near Raleigh, North Carolina, but they came like wagon trains, like the West, I guess, you know?

So some went into Michigan and others came into Indiana.

Michigan is more of an open state than--than Indiana.

And Michigan was one of the few states that blacks could buy On the 1860 map, there are over twenty five black owned farms.

So they were well established here.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Cass County, Michigan, became a safe haven for people escaping bondage in the south, as the area, along with much of the St. Joseph Valley, was part of the Underground Railroad.

It wasn't underground, it wasn't a railroad, it was many trails from generally the border slave states up into free states.

And so along the way, were these safe houses.

The trail that people used to come here was the Quaker trail.

The Quaker religion believed that all men were created equal and they helped black people establish this So between the white people, the black people, the Indians, we all got along, interacted... And, I have relatives that are blond hair, blue I have relatives that are dark skinned.

So it is all mixed.

When the Civil War broke out, the free men of Cass County answered their nation's call.

Over 100 black men from this area volunteered with the 102nd Colored troops to fight in the Civil War.

What courage.

Joining the men of Cass County in their fight, were people from all along the St. Joseph River, including over 400 volunteers from the student body of Hillsdale College, the first in the nation to explicitly prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion or sex.

And at the height of the war, famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered an address at the college entitled Popular Error and Unpopular Truth.

During his visit, he even posed for a photograph, one which is said to have been his favorite.

After the war, one veteran would use the resources of the St. Joseph River Valley to become royalty... of a sort.

Russel Marion Kellogg would become known as the Strawberry King thanks to his massive fruit farm outside of Three Rivers.

They were the largest grower and exporter of strawberries around the world.

They were actually irrigating here on that property a hundred years ago, utilizing some of our natural water resources.

It's a great area for fruit farming because of the climate.

Lake Michigan moderates the temperatures.

Growers continue to make use of this unique climate.

And many of today's farms have been in the same family for generations.

"Thank you."

We are, with my grandson, sixth generation, but with five generations of farmers.

It goes back to, of course, Europe.

Coming over from the Ukraine and Germany and Poland.

So this is the farm where my grandparents actually sow.

When I was a little kid, we lived on the other side of the hill and I could sneak over here to grandma.

Something about agriculture, you can't get it out of you.

And due to its seasonal nature, the fruit industry has long attracted migrant workers to spend summers in the St. Joseph Valley.

(♪) Because we heard there's something up north.

El norte, right?

Hay trabajo en el norte, there's work up north.

And so both my parents crossed the river, just like this river, crossed the river for a better opportunity.

And when we moved to Michigan, there was so many farms to work The product from the St. Joe area, land in many other different states throughout the United States.

So it's not just St. Joe.

We're feeding a nation here.

Today, the fruit of the St. Joseph Valley is transported to the rest of the nation, mainly over the road.

But in its early days, the river was critical to the success of the industry.

Fruit is such a highly perishable commodity, you have to get that to market quickly and quickly means primarily river traffic.

You can ship it down the St. Joseph River to the mouth of the river.

At one point, there were six steamboats the clock doing nothing but carrying peaches to In fact, one ship, the Hippocampus, sank in 1868 because they overloaded her with As boatloads of fruit were traveling out of the river, another commodity was coming upstream; tourists.

And so you could board one of these ships in Chicago, come across in style to St. Joseph, Benton Harbor, and there you could travel out to one of these wonderful resorts.

Remember, this is the days before air conditioning.

The cities are hot in the summer and they they smell especially before the automobile comes in.

It's horses and all that that implies.

People want to get away from that.

Many of these tourists were transported by boats built at the mouth of the river as shipyards specializing in small watercraft would ultimately take hold in St. Joseph and Benton Harbor.

Probably the best known of them was the May Graham, which was a side Wheeler, and she was built in St. Joseph.

There was a captain, James Fikes and his wife, Caroline, and people said that he was this wonderful character, an affable fellow, and children loved him.

They would run down.

When the boat came in at Berrien Springs, they said he'd play games with the kids.

And I was fortunate enough to interview an elderly woman who remembered him.

And I talked to her about the May Graham and she said, Oh, I can lay in bed at night and I can hear that bolt whistle.

(boat whistle sound) The whistles of steam boats gradually disappeared from the river as roads and rail became the preferred mode of transport.

But the waters of the St. Joseph, continued to provide power for industries throughout the river basin.

In Three Rivers, the Sheffield car company built the rail cars that helped replace riverboats.

They produced everything here in Three Rivers from the hand cars up to full size railroad cars, with some of them having their own gasoline engines.

In Hillsdale, Fredrick Stock used the power of the rivers headwaters to reinvigorate a struggling flour mill.

Frederick, deep into the race, he turned it into a world wide supplier of flour.

Singer Sewing Machine used the river to power a giant factory in South Bend.

In Mishawaka, a woolen mill evolved into the massive Mishawaka Rubber and Woolen Manufacturing Company famous for its ball band footwear and numerous other products.

In Benton Harbor, the upstart Upton machine company grew into the Whirlpool Corporation.

And in Elkhart, it's been said a split lip from a bar fight led Charles Gerard Conn to invent a rubberized mouthpiece for his Kornet, the invention gave rise to the C.G.

Conn instrument company, giving Elkhart the distinction as the band instrument capital of the world.

And another village on the St. Joseph is another kind of capital.

Colon, Michigan is known as the magic capital of the world has been for over 80 years.

Harry Blackstone, Sr., Was the first magician to arrive in Colon, Michigan.

His wife found this plot of land down on the St. Joe And so for the next twenty five years or so, they brought the entire troupe here, got the show ready to take back on the road.

We have two magic theaters, three or four magic areas that you can buy all kinds of magic from.

First week of August, we have a magic get together, and so there's magicians coming from all over the world.

We have more magicians buried in our cemetery than anywhere in the world.

They made coal in their home coming up every year, and they wanted to make this their final resting place.

So we call this the Final Act.

What could be seen as another type of magic was also embraced in the St. Joseph valley.

As mill races and waterwheels gave way to a new type of power; hydroelectricity.

(rushing water and music) Starting in the late 19th century, new hydroelectric dams were built all along the St. Joseph.

These are still producing electricity.

The Three Rivers Dam, Constantine and Mottville.

Sturgis, Michigan is known as the Electric City, thanks to the hydroelectric plant it constructed and still operates on the river, even though the community is miles away from the St. Joseph.

And the dams did more than create electricity, they also reshaped the river.

Each one of those hydroelectric dams, the impoundment or lake that builds behind there, is hiding the old river valley.

The impoundment caused by the Sturgis Dam meant a landmark in St. Joseph County, Michigan.

The Langley Covered Bridge had to be raised by roughly eight feet, and other impoundments would even be given names like Lake Chapin near Berrien Springs and Union Lake in Union City, Michigan, whose dam continues to be a point of pride for the community.

The imagination of a few people put this together and installed this in 1923 generating electricity for almost 100 years, and it keeps on going.

The water comes through here and it flows underneath here.

And it turns the turbines that generates electricity.

For almost a century, the St. Joseph River has provided communities with clean, consistent power through its hydroelectric dams.

structures would have an unanticipated impact on fish life in the river.

At one time, there were 17 dams on the main branch of the St. Joe River.

What you don't realize that the effect it has, it was good at one time to provide cheap electricity, to run the mills and so on, but it interfered with the migration of the fish.

Everyplace there was a dam, the fish couldn't get upstream, so they put in fish ladders.

The problem is native fish don't use fish ladders.

Among the species cut off from their natural spawning grounds is the oldest and largest native fish in the Great Lakes.

The biggest fish that I know of that was caught in Lake Michigan was a lake sturgeon, probably about 12 feet long and about 360 pounds.

Years ago, someone actually caught a lake sturgeon in the St. Joe River in Hillsdale County.

They came that far upstream and they can't do that now.

Today, the Lake Sturgeon in Lake Michigan are considered threatened, partly due to limited access to their traditional spawning areas.

And the success of the communities along the St. Joseph would have further repercussions, many of which were not expected or understood.

We really weren't cognizant of the dangers of dumping chemicals right into the St. Joseph River.

Back in the day, you would flush the toilet, the contents would eventually make it right into the St. Joseph River.

And it was the sewer.

It all went in the river.

Pollution ran so rampant in the St. Joseph that a 1930s study by the Indiana Board of Health found the river to be a danger to public health and to fish life.

At one time, there was only three species of fish living in the river.

You know, it was essentially In less than a century of development and industrialization, the St. Joseph River, a stream that had provided for people for generations, had turned into not much more than an open sewer.

But the 1930s saw a glimmer of hope for the river as early sewage treatment plants began to be built along the St. Joseph and its tributaries.

One early facility is the Goshen treatment plant along the Elkhart River.

Wastewater treatment plants are important because it helps remove chemical contaminants in the waste water, nutrients, solids, and what we're trying to do is get a water quality that is acceptable for human contact, but then also for the flora and fauna.

Occasionally, throughout its history, the Saint Joseph has overwhelmed these facilities and their communities.

Most recently in 2018.

We are now at a 500 year flood level.

We have never seen anything like the flood of 2018.

It gets in our face sometimes in a bad way, and we need to be really aware that that's part of a big system wide approach that we've taken to the river in the way of turning our backs to it for too long and not embracing how it functions.

The intensity of the rains that have been coming recently, also hard surface areas, so we had a lot of development.

We've also had fill in the old floodplain areas.

So all that is, you know, basically intensified the flooding conditions we've experienced.

Intense flooding can lead to the release of untreated sewage into the St. Joseph and its tributaries during events known as combined sewer overflows.

If the treatment plant can't handle the extra volume of water, then it ends up directly into a river like the St. Joe.

Well, that's not a good thing for the river because you don't want to put contaminated water back into the freshwater system.

Communities throughout the watershed are working on ways to reduce these events.

One example is Goshen's wet weather detention What this does is take in the excess flow from our combined sewers, holds it until our treatment plant is at a lower capacity.

It can handle that excess flow.

That is flow that would normally be discharged untreated to the Elkhart River, which would then in turn go to the St. Joe.

A flood mitigation project of another kind is in progress on another tributary of the St. Joseph, the Pokagon band of Potawatomi are working to restore meanders and wetlands to the straitened Dowagiac River.

This is the beginning of a Meander project, and what that will do is open the river up to the flood plains.

The flood plain is connected to the river and aquatic organisms and the ecosystem in this area can go back to conditions that they're used to or are more important to for survival.

One species that will benefit from the Meander Project is Mnomen, the wild rice that may have brought the Potawatomi to the region long ago.

The plant has struggled over the last century in channelized streams.

We're trying to replant river rice in a lot of the rivers And it's not taking because the water is flowing too fast for the wild rice to take root and come up.

Both the Pokagon and Nottawaseppi Huron bands are working to bring back river rice.

Mnomen is a major food source for the Potawatomi people, so it's our purpose to revitalize our culture.

We'll start harvesting in late August, early September for this plant in particular, but it's all part of bringing back that cultural identity because a people without an identity are lost.

I would like to just keep practicing my traditional ways and pass it on.

That way we can bring this cultural back to life and make it strong again.

The return of Mnomen will also strengthen an entire ecosystem.

Wild rice is actually kind of a keystone species in that if the wild rice is there, there are lots of other animals that come to the area.

It's tied to everything else.

While efforts continue to bring back river rice, other species are returning to the St. Joseph watershed in good numbers, as biologists have witnessed firsthand.

So my job is primarily looking at the biology in the river, looking at fish and other animals that live in it, and I do that to gather basically the health of the river.

They tell me a lot about river health.

There's been a significant change from our records in the early 1900s, it was essentially dead and towards the 1980s we started to see somewhat of an increase, I think maybe about 40 to 50 species.

And so it keeps getting better as time goes on.

The St. Joe River watershed in its entirety, including the tributaries, we've got about eighty five different species of fish that we've documented.

So it's just a really kind of flourishing ecosystem with an abundance of different species.

And so we've got a really good way of connecting people to the river by showing them the different types of fish that live in it.

"Kind of looks like a bottom feeder.

You guys are right."

Oftentimes we'll meet school groups at the river and we'll have a field trip.

The goal there is to get the kids to interact with the fish.

So they're having some hands-on interaction with the river and being educated in a really fun way.

(Laughter and Clapping) Another species is also returning to the river; people.

A movement that arguably began with the repurposing of an industrial relic in the 1980s.

The East Race after its industrial duty was over, somebody had a great idea Whitewater rafting course.

REPORTER: "The course diverts water from the St. Joseph River and has already been host to the United States team trials and the International Calibur Mid-America slalom series."

I think people thought they were crazy at the time.

This was the first manmade whitewater park in North And it's amazing how far people will travel to paddle on the East Race.

I think that brought people back to the river because it connected them with it.

And I think once people connect with it, they're more apt to protect it.

They're aware of it.

So they know that it's something that needs care.

Caring for the river on its upper reaches is a group calling themselves the River Rats.

An organization growing out of the actions of one person.

I felt like I was motivated to clean up the river.

That was part of my payback for being able to enjoy such a beautiful place, and a couple other people got involved and we literally cleaned the entire river all the way up to Jonesville, boatloads of trash.

We're talking 150 years accumulation; barrels, tires, you name it.

It was trash.

And because the river was trashed all those years, nobody had any respect for I have a T-shirt.

These shirts are given to children to clean the park downtown.

They developed an interest for the river, and I think as they grew older, they've retained that interest.

So environmentally, it was a marvelous thing.

And for the future, it's been great.

The river's still clean and nobody trashes it anymore.

Now that the river is cleaner, people continue to develop new ways to enjoy it.

In Union City, a guided water trail educates paddlers as they travel through town.

The summer, we launched it, It was so wonderful to see the parking lots full and all the kayaks on cars.

One of our, I think, most interesting sites, is the island, but the Broadway bridge is back behind me there in the flood of 1908, droped into the river, it floated this far and the silt and the debris built up on it over the years and created the only island that I know of within the village here and within the trail is the island that beneath it lies the second Broadway bridge.

Definitely it's brought people back to the river.

I don't know how many people stop and read every sign, but it's been fun.

It's been it's hugely satisfying.

Perhaps the most noticeable change can be seen in the rivers old industrial heart, where it flows through Indiana.

Something snapped and changed.

And it was this is part of what makes our community special.

And so what we started to see is homes built along the river, you know, downtowns building river walks along the river, you know, the parks sort of coming alive.

And now what we're seeing is businesses wanting to be on the river, wanting to face the river and and really the city embracing the river as part of its economic development In Elkhart, old mill races now boast river In Mishawaka, the former site of the massive ball band Footwear Factory is now a new riverfront neighborhood.

And in South Bend, the University of Notre Dame has embraced the river in numerous ways, both as a sporting venue and soon as a source of clean power, thanks to a new hydroelectric plant that promises that the river will continue to produce power for years to come.

And alongside that project are new parks, residences and an art installation known as River Lights, which since 2015 has celebrated the St. Joseph River and its connection to the community.

A connection celebrated throughout the entire watershed.

The river is our life, that's what gives us quality of life.

It's special to me because it's home.

If it wasn't here, we wouldn't be here.

And as long as we're here for the river, I think we'll have a great relationship for a long time to come.

Seven generations ago, our ancestors were thinking about us so that we could enjoy the privileges that we have today.

So we need to pay it forward.

These resources that nature has to offer doesn't belong to us.

It belongs to our children and their children because they're the ones that are going to need it tomorrow.

The St. Joseph River is the heart of southern Michigan and northern Indiana.

Throughout its history.

It has attracted people from all walks of life and provided for them in countless ways.

If cared for, the St. Joseph River will continue to do the same for generations to come.

(♪) (♪) Then, Now and Always, the St. Joseph River Story, has been brought to you by our title sponsors, the Robbie and Pamela Rask family, recognizing the beauty and cherishing the values that the waters of the St. Joseph River bring to our region and by... (♪) Thank you.

This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

(Closed Captioning by Nicholas Ramirez & Donavan Barrier)