The grave that is not there

1818 · ASSERTED IN BRONZE, ABSENT IN THE RECORD

Mishawaka's most famous grave belongs to a woman who never lived: The monument the citizens of Mishawaka erected in 1932 — a statue on a native boulder provided by the Daughters of the American Revolution, its tablet given by the Lions Club, standing today on the riverwalk at Lincoln Park — states on its face, in the city's own official words, that the daughter of Chief Elkhart "was buried near this spot in 1818, dying at the age of thirty two." The Folklore section of this record prints that tablet entire and tests the tale whole: its first and only early source is a work of fiction, Flavel B. Littlejohn's Legends of Michigan and the Old North West of 1875, and the death, the age, and the burial near that spot appear in no document earlier than the monument tradition itself — the book contains none of them. There is no grave to find, because there was no woman to bury; the Tribes section treats the 1932 marker as what it is, a symbolic marker and not a documented grave, and this entry does not reopen the tale it caps.

Set against the bronze is the record's true blank. The people who actually lived and died at the rapids — the village of the entries above — have no documented burial in print at all. No Mishawaka burial of the village's dead is documented in any source the Tribes section reached; the one published cemetery statement in the record belongs to Pokagon's people across the state line, at Bertrand Township, and is printed there at its published size as a boundary, not borrowed as this city's. The settlers' own grounds, by contrast, are documented to the burial book: the three cemeteries of the old Indiana City plat — the City Cemetery, St. Joseph's of 1863, and Fairview — carry transcribed burials and a documented course in the Neighborhoods and Haunted Places sections, down to the one eccentric interment the tour trade tells. The shape of the whole is worth stating once, plainly: the grave this city points to with a monument is the one grave on its ground that cannot exist, and the dead its ground certainly holds, from the village years, are the dead no record names. What was lost was not a grave. It was the names.

Sources:

1. the Folklore section of this history — the monument's tablet quoted entire, the tale's three forms printed side by side, and the documentary spine beneath them: the 1875 novel as first and only early source.
2. the The Peoples of the Rapids section of this history — the 1932 marker treated as symbolic, not a documented grave; no Mishawaka burial documented in print; the Bertrand Township statement (Buechner, 1933) carried at boundary size.
3. the Ghost Stories and Neighborhoods section of this history — the three burying grounds of the Indiana City plat and their documented course.