The peoples of the valley, in sequence

First in the record and in possession at contact — two different facts — and what this ground's record names: nothing, printed whole

The deep frame, at its boundary: The published archaeology of the valley opens deep. The reconnaissance study for the Fort St. Joseph project (Cremin and others, Western Michigan University Archaeological Reports No. 22, 1999) puts the lower valley's habitability at the end of the ice: the valley "probably first became habitable at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. The last 14,000 years… represent a time of great environmental change in the St. Joseph River valley" — a lower-valley statement, made of Berrien County ground, printed at that boundary. The state's cultural chronology (Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology) runs the sequence at state strength: Paleoindian about 10,000 to 7500 BC; the Archaic in its early, middle and late spans; the Woodland periods; the Mississippian; and the Historic from about AD 1650. A Notre Dame study of the two counties' recorded sites (Davis, senior thesis) maps forty sites across LaPorte and St. Joseph counties against topography, soils and drainage — the strongest published county statement of where the deep record lies — and a valley-wide distribution study (Kohley, 2013) plots the sites of AD 600–1690, 1691–1781 and 1782–1850 against the river-oriented economy the ethnohistory describes: winter hunting, spring maple sap, spring and summer fishing, the fall nut harvest. No published source reached places a named site on this section's ground, and the state's site file is closed to this build; the deep frame stands at valley and state strength, as printed.

First in the record: the Miami: The first people the written record names in this valley are the Miami — the Myaamia — and their own account stands first in the telling, as it stands in the Mishawaka and South Bend legs of this build. In the telling Waapanaakikaapwa — Gabriel Godfroy — gave to J. P. Dunn in the early 1900s, carried now by the Myaamia Center of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Myaamia emerged at Saakiiweeyonki, "the Confluence," on Saakiiweesiipiwi, the St. Joseph River. The tribe's wordings place that confluence in two ways — the community history puts it on "the St. Joseph River near South Bend," other tribal tellings put it where the St. Joseph meets Lake Michigan — and the two are carried unreconciled here, as they are in the South Bend leg where the question was dug. The documentary record agrees on the priority if not the place: the river's first French name was the river of the Miamis, and the valley's marker record states it in one sentence: "The Miami were the first recorded tribe known to have lived in the valley before 1668. The main village was located east of the St. Joseph River at the present day site of Niles, Michigan. Other villages were recorded in present day South Bend and Waterford Mills, Indiana." A great Miami village stood where the portage met the river — Howard's Harris chapter neighbor says it plainly of German Township: "Here, near the spot yet known as Mount Pleasant, was once the great Miami village, where, in 1681 La Salle made his celebrated treaty with the Miami tribe."

In possession at contact: the Potawatomi: Possession at the treaty era is a different fact from priority in the record, and this section keeps them separate as the checklist of this build requires. Across the French century the Miami centre of gravity moved southeast, to Kekionga and the Wabash, and the valley's people at contact and at every treaty table in this section are the Potawatomi — Bodéwadmi, in their own word Neshnabé; the citizens of the band that stayed are Pokégan Bodwéwadmik dbéndagwzéwad in the band's own collective name. The chief line of the St. Joseph Potawatomi runs in the record from Nanaquiba (Aniquiba) to his son Topenebee — Topinabee, principal chief, his villages opposite present Niles, who signed the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 as first of the "Putawatames of the River St. Joseph" in Barce's 1918 reading — to Leopold Pokagon, who succeeded him in 1826 — in leadership: the principal-chief title descended to Topenebee's own son, as the treaty paper shows (Tribes, tribes-succession) — and whose name carries the exception entry below. The valley held other towns in the same centuries: Moccasin presided over a village near Moccasin Bluff in Berrien County in the early 1800s, and a 2022 federal NAGPRA notice for that ground traces shared group identity between its people and the present-day Potawatomi and Miami, both tribes having had, in the notice's words, "a predominant presence in the St. Joseph River Valley from the time of first contact with the French through the early-1800s."

What this ground's record names: For the Mishawaka townsite, four miles southeast of this ground's southern edge, the record names exactly one Potawatomi village — on the river's south bank at the rapids, on ground now bounded by Lincolnway West, North Main and West streets, with a small cleared tract whose conical corn hills, "about two feet high," survived years into settlement (Chapman, 1880) — and it names no chief for that village in any record reached; the village appears in no standard village list, and De Kever's account of its end about 1820, by smallpox, stands as a single modern source at his strength. For this section's ground the record names less, and the less is printed whole: no village, no chief, no band is named for the Harris Prairie upland in any source reached — not in the county histories, not in the treaty record, not in the standard village lists, not in the staying band's published list of its towns, which runs from Hartford, Rush Lake, Dowagiac, Niles and Buchanan in Michigan to South Bend in Indiana and stops there. This ground was the valley nation's upcountry: the hunting ground, the field ground, the kin ground between the river towns below and the chiefs' towns at the state line above, used by a people whose named places stood on the river. The discipline of this build is to print exactly that — the use without the invented village, the nation without the invented chief. The burial and mound record runs with it: no documented burial or mound on this ground appears in published sources; Cyrus Thomas's 1887 mound survey for the Bureau of Ethnology reports no mound on the neighboring townsite either, and corn hills are an agricultural surface, not mounds. What the surveyors of 1829 found on the prairie — old-field or forest — the land entry below takes up; the government's own field notes for this township are the record that would say more, and they stand named as this section's gap.

Sources: Cremin and others, Fort St. Joseph reconnaissance, WMU Archaeological Reports No. 22 (1999) — the lower valley's habitability, at its stated boundary; Indiana DHPA cultural chronology (Jones & Johnson) — the state sequence; Davis (University of Notre Dame senior thesis) — the forty recorded sites of the two counties; Kohley (WMU, IMAGIN 2013) — site distributions and the river-oriented economy after Holman & Brashler; Myaamia Center, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — the emergence account, Waapanaakikaapwa's telling to J. P. Dunn, and the two wordings of Saakiiweeyonki, as dug in the South Bend leg of this project; the Elkhart river marker record, as carried in the Mishawaka history — the Miami first in the record and the village locations; Howard (1907), Chapter V, §1 — the great Miami village at Mount Pleasant and La Salle's 1681 treaty; Barce (1918) — Topenebee's Greenville signature, as carried in the Mishawaka history; Federal Register NAGPRA notice (October 2022) — Moccasin Bluff and the two tribes' predominant presence; Chapman (1880) and De Kever — the rapids village, its corn hills and its end, as established in the Mishawaka leg; the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians' published village list — no town on this ground, as tested in the Mishawaka leg and re-stated here; Thomas, Bureau of Ethnology mound survey (1887) — the county negative, at published strength.