915 M. SOUTH BEND, Pop. 70,983.
(Train 3 passes 5:30; No. 41, 10:38; No. 25, 7:45; No. 19, 1:43. Eastbound: No. 6 passes 12:20; No. 26, 2:22; No. 16, 3:32; No. 22, 7:45.)
South Bend is situated on the St. Joseph River. Just north of the city is the portage between the St. Joseph and the Kankakee Rivers, by means of which Père Marquette in 1675 and La Salle in 1679 made their way into what is now the state of Illinois.
This portage was part of the long land and water highway by which the mound-builders in pre-historic times conveyed copper from the Lake Superior to points as distant as Mexico and South America.
As there is no place in the U.S. but the south shore of Lake Superior where native copper can be mined, its presence in the mounds, at remote points is an infallible guide in tracing the commercial intercourse of the Mound-builders. Copper boulders are also found on the shore, and even as far south as Indiana and Illinois. That the whole extent of the copper-bearing region was mined in remote times by a race of whom the Indians preserve no tradition there is abundant evidence, such as numerous excavations in the solid rock, heaps of rubble and dirt along the courses of the veins, copper utensils such as knives, chisels, spears, arrowheads, stone hammers creased for the attachment of withes, wooden bowls for boiling water from the mines, wooden shovels, ladders, and levers for raising and supporting masses of copper. The high antiquity of this mining is inferred from these facts: that the trenches and pits were filled level with the surrounding surface so that their existence was not suspected; that on the piles of rubbish were found growing trees of great age, such as hemlock trees having annual rings showing that they began before the coming of Columbus. Copper wrought into utensils is found in the mounds all the way from Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast, and the supply is too abundant to authorize the supposition that it was derived from boulder drift. So expert were these miners that on the site of the Minnesota mine they lifted a copper mass weighing 6 tons, supporting on a frame of wood 5 ft. high.
The earliest white settler was Pierre Navarre, one of the fraternity of the coureurs de bois—a wild, rascally, fearless crew of half-breeds and renegade whites, who were the first to invade this famous hunting country. The succession of sheltered prairies, rounded sand-hills, and reedy marches cut by sluggish streams widening into lakes, made a good haunt for all game, especially beaver. Now the water is mostly drained away and the land reclaimed, but at one time much of the region could be passed over in canoes.
Pierre Navarre (1785-1874) was the son of a French army officer. Besides Canadian French, he could speak the Pottowattomie Indian dialect, and had some knowledge of woodcraft and nature signs. In his calling of fur trader he made friends with the Miamis and their chief, Little Turtle, and when the War of 1812 broke out, offered the services of the tribe to Gen. Hull, as well as his own. The offers were declined, so the flouted Miamis transferred their allegiance to the British under Gen. Proctor. So good a scout was Navarre that a reward of $1,000 for his head or scalp was promised by Proctor. "He used to say," writes an old chronicler who knew him, "that the worst night he ever spent was as bearer of a despatch from Gen. Harrison, then at Ft. Meigs, to Ft. Stephenson (now Fremont). Amid a thunderstorm of great fury and fall of water, he made the trip of thirty miles through the unbroken wilderness and the morning following delivered to Gen. Harrison a reply." He died in his 89th year at East Toledo.
The University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, with 1,200 students, is the largest Catholic school for boys and young men in the country, and the American headquarters of the worldwide Order of the Holy Cross. Notre Dame was founded in 1842 by Father Sorin, a Frenchman, who accomplished his object under great difficulties.
Jacques Marquette
Jacques Marquette was born at Laon, France, and as a Jesuit priest went to Canada in 1666, where he was chosen to explore the Mississippi River with Joliet, a young Canadian explorer, in 1673, the French having begun to gain knowledge of the prairies from the Indians. Following a route through Green Bay and up the Fox River to a point where they made a portage to the Wisconsin, Marquette and Joliet finally reached the Mississippi. On their return to Michigan, Marquette fell ill, and his attempt in the following year to found a mission among the Indians of the Illinois River proved too much for his broken strength. On the way home he died beside a little stream which enters Marquette Bay on Lake Michigan.
When Father Sorin arrived in Indiana in 1841, leaving behind a comfortable life in France for missionary work among the Indians, he found on the present site of Notre Dame only waste land covered with snow, and only one building, a tumble down log hut. With $5 to begin work of erecting a school, he started in courageously, and spent five days repairing the hut and fitting it up so that one half served as a chapel and the other as a dwelling for himself and 6 lay-brothers. In 1844 his little college was chartered as a university by the legislature of Indiana. Father Sorin was elected superior-general of the Order of the Holy Cross for life. Besides Notre Dame, he founded many other schools and colleges in the United States and Canada. He died at South Bend in 1893. His co-worker, Father Badin, was the first priest consecrated in the United States.
The mural frescoes of the main university building are by Luigi Gregori, who was sent from the Vatican for this purpose, and who spent twenty years on this work and on the adjacent Church of the Sacred Heart. The latter is famous for its decoration, especially the beautiful altar. St. Mary's, a large girls' school conducted by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, has also fine buildings of more modern type than Notre Dame.
Schuyler Colfax at one time vice-president of the U.S. and for years an intimate and trusted friend of Lincoln's, lived here in his youth, as did the late James Whitcomb Riley. The soldier who, during the Great War, fired the first gun of the American army in France against the Germans was Alex Arch, a native of this city.
Though born in N.Y., Schuyler Colfax (1823-1885) passed his early years first in New Carlisle, Ind., then in South Bend, where his step-father was county auditor. After doing some journalistic work, he began his public career by making campaign speeches for Henry Clay in 1844. In 1852 he joined the newly formed Republican party, and served in Congress from 1854 to 1869. His name was widely mentioned for the office of postmaster-general in Lincoln's cabinet, but the president selected another man on the ground that Colfax "was a young man, running a brilliant career, and sure of a bright future in any event." In 1863 Colfax was elected Speaker of the House, and in 1868 vice-president. Four years later Colfax was implicated in a corruption charge, which though found groundless by the Senate Judiciary Committee, cast a shadow over the latter part of his life.
James Whitcomb Riley was born in 1853 in Greenfield, Ind. He spent several years as a strolling sign-painter, actor, and musician, during which time he revised plays and composed songs, and grew closely in touch with the life of the Indiana farmer. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and before long had attained a recognized position as poet-laureate of the Western country folk. His materials are the incidents and aspects of village life, especially of the Indiana villages. These he interprets in a manner as acceptable to the naïve as to the sophisticated, which is saying a good deal for this type of verse. Some of his best known books are The Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers, Home Folks, A Defective Santa Claus, The Old Swimmin' Hole, An Old Sweetheart of Mine, and Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
Among the important manufactories of South Bend are plows, sewing-machines, underwear, and motor-cars. The annual value of the combined output is around $60,000,000.