The river initially flows southwardly into Marshall County, past Bremen; then generally southwestwardly, returning to its naturally winding riverbed and flowing through the city of Plymouth; and westwardly in a substantially straightened course through Starke County, past the city of Knox.

It flows into the Kankakee River in southwestern Starke County, approximately 10 miles (16 km) west of Knox near the town of English Lake.

[12] Main Poc was a warrior and chief among the Yellow River Potawatomi first coming to notice at the Treaty of Greenville (July 1795), which was to bring peace to the frontier.

When they reached across the Mississippi to attack the Osage in what had become the U.S.'s Louisiana Territory, the American military called for a council.

Main Poc and Turkey Foot did not attend and kept traveling out of their Yellow River communities to raid other Indian villages.

In 1807, Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet came to Indiana and Main Poc joined in his plans to hold back the white settlers.

With Main Poc's move to Prophetstown in 1809, the Yellow River was no longer the seat of war among the Potawatomis.

The Carey Mission was established on the St. Joseph River, north of the Twin Lakes in the area where Niles, Michigan now stands.

At the time of European settlement, the area of the confluence of the Yellow and Kankakee Rivers was a densely vegetated marsh, seven miles (11 km) long, known as English Lake.

The lower Yellow River was confined to a straightened channel and the wetland was drained and converted to farmland by the 1910s.

[8] The straightened section of the Yellow River in Starke County, which had historically been a swampy and winding stream with numerous oxbow lakes,[8] was the subject of a 2004 effort by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to address excess accumulation of sediment in the river's streambed as a result of channelization.