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What the ground has yielded of the age of ice — searched, and not found, with the record's edge stated
The search: The great beasts of the ice age are the natural expectation for two hundred feet of drift over marsh and buried forest, and the expectation has a catalogue tradition of its own: Oliver Perry Hay's mastodon catalogue of record for Indiana, the find papers of the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, the Indiana State Museum's published accounts, and the press record. Searched for this county, that record is empty. No mastodon, no mammoth, no Pleistocene vertebrate find from St. Joseph County appears in the catalogue tradition, the academy papers, the museum's published accounts or the press record reached. The named finds of the literature belong to other counties and are printed here at their size to show the record is real and this county is simply not in it: the Garrett Mastodon of DeKalb County (1933), the Richmond Mastodon of Noble County (1930), "Joseph" of Pulaski County (1960, now at the Field Museum), the Parrish and Glasford mastodons of Fulton County, "Fred" the Buesching mastodon of Allen County (1998, died about 13,200 years ago), "Alfred" of Jackson County (2019), and the Christensen Bog bone bed of Hancock County (13,000 to 12,000 years before present). The Indiana State Museum's public statement that mastodon bones occur in "most of Indiana's ninety-two counties" is a state-frame sentence; it is not converted here into a county find, and no Granger ground, prairie, marsh or creek bank in this record has yielded a bone.
What the ground holds instead: The record of life in this ground's drift is the buried forest of the drift entry above — strata of ancient soil between sheets of boulder clay, with tree trunks, branches and roots "belonging to what have been large forest trees," observed in the wells and cuttings of the nineteenth century and printed by the county history from Maurice Thompson's account — and the marl and peat of the marsh beds, the county's bog iron, peat and marl standing in the period lists of its surface products. That is the whole of it: forests the ice buried and marshes the lake left, at county strength, with no township's name attached to a single specimen in any source reached.
The record's edge: A negative is only as good as its search, and the search's edge is stated plainly: the Indiana State Museum's locality files, which hold find records that never reached print, and Hay's catalogue entries read directly rather than through the tradition that cites them, would settle the negative's final form. Until they are read, the negative stands as what it is — no published find — and it is carried forward in this build's notes as a named gap with those settling sources named. The edge is the same for the archaeological record of the next entry: the state's site file (SHAARD) is restricted to professional access, and every site negative in this build is bounded to published sources. No site locations are given in this section for any period.