The Tale in Its Three Forms: The Book, the Bronze, and the City's Own Summary

1875–1932–today · the variants, printed side by side

Why three entries' worth of variants gets its own article: Mishawaka does not tell its legend one way. It tells it three ways, in three carriers of descending age and ascending authority, and the differences are not details — on the question of how the story ends, the carriers contradict one another outright. A folklore record prints them side by side and lets the reader watch a tale being edited by its city.

The second form — the bronze of 1932: the city's centennial monument, a statue on a native boulder provided by the Mishawaka Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the monument planned and the tablet given by the local Lions Club, erected by the citizens of Mishawaka in 1932, carries the tale in the city's own official words, and they are worth quoting entire, because thousands have read the story in exactly this form and no other: “The daughter of Chief Elkhart, was buried near this spot in 1818, dying at the age of thirty two. She was a beautiful, graceful, athletic, and brave Indian maiden, the central figure in two local Indian wars. Treacherously wounded by her jealous Indian lover, she was rescued and protected by her white lover whom she married. Our city was named in her honor.” Beside the book, the tablet keeps the wound and — remarkably — keeps the marriage: its princess is rescued by her white lover “whom she married.” What the tablet adds, and the book nowhere contains, is everything else: the death in 1818 at thirty-two, the burial “near this spot,” the two wars, and the naming of the city in her honor, stated as fact without a qualifying word. The tablet still stands — photographed for the Historical Marker Database in May 2024 on the South River Walk Trail at Lincoln Park, its text fully legible — and it carries no word anywhere on it that the woman it describes came out of a book.

The third form — the city's modern summary: the tale as the city's own commissioned history retells it, and as this history's spine prints that retelling, is shorter and darker than either predecessor: the princess loved the white trapper Dead Shot; the jealous Grey Wolf captured her; in the fight both men died; the princess, stabbed in the struggle, recovered and lived on until 1818, when she died aged thirty-two and was buried near what is now Lincoln Park. Against the book, this form kills Dead Shot — the husband of ten years' standing in Littlejohn's later chapters dies here in the fight — and moves the capture onto Grey Wolf, where the book gives it to Pokagon's Potawatomi. Against the tablet, it keeps the 1818 death and the grave the tablet invented, and drops the marriage the tablet kept. Even the suitor's nation will not hold still between carriers: the book makes Gray Wolf a Shawnee of Elkhart's own people; the city's summary, as the Story of Mishawaka section prints it, makes him a Potawatomi; the standard modern encyclopedia account makes him a Shawnee warrior again. The three forms agree on a skeleton — a chief's daughter, a white marksman, a jealous rival, a knife, a wound survived — and on almost nothing else, and the skeleton is the part that came out of the book.

The record beside the variants: the documentary spine beneath all three forms is one line long, and it is the Story of Mishawaka section's: a work of fiction, published in 1875, is the first and only early source for every element of every form. What the variants themselves document — and it is a real documentation, of the tellers rather than the tale — is a city editing its founding story across a century: softening the war saga into a romance for a bronze tablet in 1932, keeping the tablet's grave because the grave had become a place, and letting the husband die in the modern summary because a love triangle reads better closed. This section prints the three forms as the record of that editing. Judging among them is the reader's work; they cannot all be the story, and on the evidence none of them is the history.

Sources:

1. The Princess Mishawaka monument tablet, Lincoln Park, Mishawaka (erected 1932; statue by the citizens of Mishawaka, boulder by the Mishawaka Chapter D.A.R., tablet by the Lions Club) — inscription transcribed in full in the Historical Marker Database entry “Princess Mishawaka Historical Marker” (photographed 21 May 2024; marker on the South River Walk Trail, Lincolnway West at Baker Street, west of Kamm Island Park).
2. Flavius J. Littlejohn, Legends of Michigan and the Old North West (1875) — the first form, as read for the preceding entry: Gray Wolf a Shawnee chief and refused suitor; the capture Pokagon's; the medal; the marriage; no 1818 death, no grave.
3. This history, spine section, legend entry — the third form: the city's commissioned history's retelling (Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History) — Dead Shot loved, Grey Wolf “the Potawatomi,” both men dead in the fight, the princess stabbed, recovered, died 1818 aged thirty-two, buried near Lincoln Park; and the legend's fictional standing.
4. “Mishawaka, Indiana,” the standard encyclopedia article (en.wikipedia.org) — the modern carrier's form: the love triangle of Mishawaka, the white trader “Dead Shot” and “a Shawnee warrior named Grey Wolf,” with the article's own note that the story is completely fictional and that many residents believe it because of the marker.