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Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, "Natural History," p. 340
The township's animal baseline is a county list written when the prairie was still in memory. Chapman opens it with the loss: "Of the species of native quadrupeds that once roamed the flowery prairies and wild forests of this county, but few of the smaller remain, and none of the larger. Of the latter we cannot even find a specimen preserved in taxidermy." The gone list is explicit — buffalo, beaver, elk, badger, panther, black wolf, and black bear. What remained he classes as very rare: gray fox, catamount, otter, lynx, Virginia deer, opossum, raccoon, mink, muskrat, weasels, skunk, woodchuck, moles, mice, and gray rabbit, with the squirrels enumerated and two bats common. (Chapman's own list carries "panther" among the gone and "catamount" among the rare; both print as he wrote them, unmerged.) Every later article in this section measures itself against this page: it is the "already gone / still here" divider the checklist demands, dated 1880, from the county's own historian.