The bison, tested on the record — and sized to the river ground

THE TEST · COUNTY RECORD AGAINST CDP GROUND

The verdict, stated at its size: on the county record, yes — the bison stood on St. Joseph County ground; on this ground, there is no record, and the distinction is the article. Chapman's sentence is the county evidence, and it is plain: "The buffalo which grazed upon the verdant prairies has been driven westward" — written of this county, in the past tense, by 1880. Behind Chapman stands the testimony his own history prints from the South Bend Tribune of 1878, in the portage chapter: the Potawatomi's animals of the St. Joseph valley "belonged to them for their sustenance" — buffalo in the valley's hunting economy, on the portage ground where the river bends. Howard's Parkovash chapter works the same ground: the Indian camps and fishing resorts of Portage Prairie, the Charlevoix portage, the prairie at the river's carrying place. The state's frame agrees with the county's memory and bounds it: the Department of Natural Resources' bison record holds that wild bison were "never in great numbers" in Indiana — animals moving between the Kentucky salt licks and the Illinois plains — and dates the end precisely: the last bison in the northwest shot at Beaver Lake in Newton County in 1824, the last wild bison in Indiana shot in Orange County in 1830. So the animal was real here, scarce here, and gone from the state by 1830, a half-century before Chapman wrote it into the county's past. Now the boundary-tell, printed plainly: every piece of bison evidence in the county record — the Parkovash, the portage, the prairie of the Tribune's telling — is St. Joseph River ground, the carrying place between the river and the Kankakee, in what is now South Bend's northwestern build and German and Portage township country. It is river-and-portage ground, nine miles and a whole watershed habit west of this CDP. No bison specimen, no bison kill, no bison place-name attaches to Clay or Harris township ground in Chapman, in Howard, or in any record reached for this section; the prairies Chapman says the buffalo grazed are the county's prairies generally, and a county sentence cannot be subdivided into a CDP claim. The bison therefore stands in this build at county size, believed on Chapman's word, and at CDP size unproven — the honest two sizes of one animal.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), Chapter II: the buffalo driven westward from the county's prairies; and the river-township chapter printing the South Bend Tribune (1878) portage passage with buffalo among the Potawatomi's sustenance animals.
2. Howard (1907), Chapter II §V, "The Parkovash, Indian Camps and Trails": the portage-prairie ground to which the county's bison testimony attaches.
3. Indiana DNR bison record (via the Department's releases and Indiana University's 2016 bison coverage of the state record): wild bison never in great numbers in Indiana; last in Newton County 1824 (Beaver Lake); last wild bison in the state, Orange County, 1830.