Mishawaha as Littlejohn Wrote Her: The Tale in Its First Telling

1875 · Flavius J. Littlejohn, Legends of Michigan and the Old North West

The teller and his framing: the tale's first documented telling is its author's, and the author is unusually candid about what he made. Flavius Josephus Littlejohn — Michigan lawyer, legislator and judge, a surveyor and geologist in the southwestern Michigan wilderness in his early years — published the collection at Allegan, Michigan, in 1875, under the full title Legends of Michigan and the Old North West; or, A Cluster of Unpublished Waifs, Gleaned Along the Uncertain, Misty Line, Dividing Traditional from Historic Times. His preface, dated Allegan, 1874, presents the legends as gleaned tradition from forty years among the peoples he describes — and also states, in the same breath, that “these legends were originally penned by the author for his own amusement, in his hours of leisure,” first issued under the pen name “Old Trailer.” Both halves of that framing are printed here, because the tale's whole later career runs on the first half being remembered and the second forgotten: the book claims the misty line between tradition and history, and its author concedes, on his own title page's doorstep, that he wrote the waifs down for amusement. What follows is the tale as the 1875 text itself tells it, read first-hand for this entry.

The tale as he wrote it: the book's opening and framing legend, “The Shawnee and Pottowatomie War; or, The Michigan Scouts of 1800-1,” sets its scene in the winter of 1800–01. Elkhart, head chief of the Shawnees of the Wabash valley, makes war on the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph; Pokagon, the Potawatomi chief, meets the invasion in the valley's middle section. The Potawatomi refuge and depot of the campaign is a place the book names in its geography chapter: “the village of Mishawakee, near what is termed ‘the South Bend’ of the St. Joseph River in the State of Indiana” — the one sentence in the book that ties the saga to this ground, and the seed from which the city's whole legend grew. In the great battle near Three Rivers in April 1801, Elkhart is wounded and disabled; his daughter Mishawaha, “the beautiful young daughter of Elkhart, and the favorite princess of the nation,” mounts her milk-white war-horse, brandishes her knife and leads a rescue charge; the Potawatomi let her through their line, cut down her few followers, and take her captive unhurt. Pokagon holds her as the campaign's “trump card” — a hostage whose release might buy the war's end — and places her for safekeeping with the neighboring chief Wakazoo.

The suitor, the scout, and the medal: the love story of the city's version exists in the book, but at the book's proportions, which are a war saga's. Gray Wolf — in the book's own words, through his scout Lynx Eye, “Gray Wolf is young Shawnee chief” — had asked for Mishawaha the year before and been refused: “Last year him want Mishawaha for wife. Elkhart say no; cause him want much big chief for her.” He hunts her through the war to steal her from her keepers. Against him stands the book's hero, the white scout Dead Shot, “the model marksman on the borders,” and the book's crisis is the one the city kept: Gray Wolf, at last face to face with her, aims a knife blow at her heart — and the blade strikes the medal she wears on her breast, a medal Dead Shot had given her and which she wore, the text says, with a strong feeling of tenderness, concealed under her hunting frock. The yielding metal turns the point; the blade glances on a rib away from the vitals; Lynx Eye dresses the wound with medicinal leaves, and she recovers. And then the book does what the city's version does not: it goes on. In the saga's later chapters the three scouts of Wakazoo are introduced afresh, years on: “Dead Shot, the leader of the trio… Mishawaha, his wife of ten years standing… Lynx Eye, the third one of the trio.” She marries the white scout, rides as his fellow scout — her tellers in the valley called her, in the text, a queen of scouts — and the book closes her story in harness, on the trail, alive. There is no death in 1818, no age of thirty-two, and no grave at the bend anywhere in the 1875 text.

The record beside the tale: the test of the legend as history — that no document of the village's time carries the princess, the chief, the trapper or the fight, and that the city's name is a Potawatomi place-name older than the tale — stands whole in this history's spine and is not re-argued here. What this entry adds is the shape of the source: a book-length war romance of 1800–01, published seventy-four years after its events by a Michigan officeholder who said he wrote it for his own amusement, in which Mishawaha is a Shawnee warrior-princess who is captured, wounded, saved by a medal, married to the hero, and last seen riding scout beside him. Every later Mishawaka telling is an abridgment of that book. The abridgments differ from it, and from each other, in the entry that follows.

Sources:

1. Flavius J. Littlejohn, Legends of Michigan and the Old North West; or, A Cluster of Unpublished Waifs, Gleaned Along the Uncertain, Misty Line, Dividing Traditional from Historic Times (Allegan, Mich.: Northwestern Bible and Publishing Co., 1875) — read first-hand for this entry (Internet Archive text, identifier legendsofmichiga00litt): the preface (Allegan, 1874) — “penned by the author for his own amusement,” the “Old Trailer” pen name, the gleaned-tradition framing; “The Shawnee and Pottowatomie War; or, The Michigan Scouts of 1800-1” — the village of “Mishawakee” at the South Bend of the St. Joseph; the April 1801 battle, her charge and capture; Pokagon's “trump card”; Lynx Eye's report (“Gray Wolf is young Shawnee chief”; “Last year him want Mishawaha for wife. Elkhart say no”); the medal turning Gray Wolf's blow and Lynx Eye's dressing of the wound; the later chapters' trio — “Dead Shot, the leader of the trio… Mishawaha, his wife of ten years standing.”
2. This history, spine section — the legend tested against the record (no document of the village's time carries it; the name a Potawatomi place-name, in its three documented readings), printed whole there and cross-referenced here.