The end of the nation's presence on this ground

There was no village here to end — what ended was the use, and the one abandonment story the valley record tells belongs to the rapids townsite, printed at boundary size with its limits

The checklist asks for the end of the village or settlement on this ground, with the limits of the account stated. This ground had no village, and so it has no abandonment story; what it has is an ending of use, and the ending is dated by the valley's record, not by any event on the prairie. The nation's presence on the upland ends the way it existed — without a document of its own. Between the deadline at Twin Lakes in August 1838 and the last Indiana columns of 1843, the people whose hunting and travelling ground this was were removed, fled, or gathered into the excepted band across the line; the surveyors had already fenced the prairie into sections, the land office had already sold the county's first entries on it — on this ground, in April 1830, while the title's human fact was still Potawatomi — and the civil frame of townships closed over it in the 1830s. The companion legs own that sequence. This section records only the tribal side of the ending: no source reached names the last band, the last family, or the last season on this ground, and the count of the removed from the upland stands as a named gap with the muster rolls as its settling source, as Before the City entered it.

The valley's one abandonment story stands four miles southeast, on the rapids townsite, and the checklist's smallpox test applies to it: the story and its limits both printed, here at boundary size because the ground is Mishawaka's and the telling is that build's. De Kever's account of the rapids village — the one Potawatomi village the record names in this county's Indiana ground — dates its end to about 1820 and gives the cause as smallpox. The limits are these: the account is a single modern source, the city's commissioned history of 1975, at that strength; no contemporary document reached in any pass of this build confirms a smallpox abandonment at the rapids, fixes its date, or names the village's people; and the village itself appears in no standard village list. The story may be true — smallpox ran through the valley's nations repeatedly in the era, and a town at a fishing rapids was exposed to every traveller the river carried — but "may be true" is where the record leaves it, and this section prints the story at exactly that weight, as the Mishawaka leg prints it: one modern account, unconfirmed, concerning another ground's town. For this ground there is not even that much, and the file does not pretend otherwise.

Sources: the removal and civil-frame sequence, as carried in Before the City — the 1838 deadline, the columns of 1840–43, the survey of 1827–29, the first entries of 19 April 1830, the township orders; De Kever, the rapids village's end about 1820 by smallpox, as established and limited in the Mishawaka history — a single modern source, unconfirmed in any contemporary record reached.