The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The trade made the valley's first fortunes, and its paper survives — but no carrier reached prints a catch value or a contract rate. The course stands documented person by person. William Burnett — "the first successful trader to occupy the St. Joseph River Valley" in the county history's telling as carried by Genealogy Trails, his ledgers among the Notre Dame Archives' Indiana History Collection (38 reels, with Lathrop Minor Taylor's and Alexis Coquillard's). Alexis Coquillard — the trade's local summit: a trading post on the river's west bank from 1823 for the American Fur Company; marriage to Frances Comparet in 1824 (the carriers vary on her relation to his partner — one says the partner's daughter, another the partner's sister; the variance prints and no relation is asserted); the Kankakee Custom Mills in 1837; appointment in 1840 to assist with the Potawatomi removal — the trade's last government wage; the gift, with Taylor, of the land for South Bend's City Cemetery; and death on 8 January 1855 from injuries taken inspecting his fire-damaged mill — a trader's fortune ending in a mill accident, the mill itself the fortune's local form (the Lakeville limb, 1854–c. 1864, in his son's hands by the partition record's generation). Patrick Marantette — the trader whose papers (Notre Dame Archives, 1833–1879) carry the 1840 removal and his claims arising from it: claims, not payments — the record preserves that he billed the government, not what he was paid. What no carrier reached states: a season's catch value, a per-pelt price realised at this post, a removal contract's rate or total, or any trader's estate figure. The trade's size for this valley is therefore printed as a course with its instruments (ledgers located, claims located), and its money stands as the residue: settlers, the NIH ledgers read as accounts, and the federal Indian-office contract record — either reachable, neither read.
Principal sources: the banked Sources lk-src-notre-dame (the NIH scope); Native Nations lk-removal and the before-the-city file of this section (the Marantette Papers' scope note); the founder's record via the Cedar Grove Cemetery page and the Cabin Days curriculum; Genealogy Trails' St. Joseph County history for the Burnett styling, at its strength.