The village the record cannot populate

BEFORE 1820 · UNEXCAVATED, AND UNNAMED IN ITS OWN RECORD

The ground is known; nearly everything on it is not: A Potawatomi village stood on the south bank of the St. Joseph River at the rapids, on ground the city's commissioned history bounds by present Lincolnway West, North Main and West Streets, drawn there by the ford, the fish, and the timber. The 1875 county atlas calls it, in one flat phrase, ground "formerly occupied by an Indian village named Mishawaka." Settlers arriving after it emptied found the physical trace of its farming: a cleared tract with conical corn hills some two feet high, still standing years into settlement, as Chapman's 1880 county history records. The city's own history states the reason for the thinness plainly: knowledge of the Potawatomis' life on this land is fragmentary because they had been absent for a decade before the first permanent white settlers arrived — the village emptied about 1820, the commissioned history says, in the year of a smallpox epidemic, and the documentary series that might have described it, the treaty councils of the 1820s and 1830s, was negotiated after it was gone.

What is not known is nearly everything else. No chief or headman is attached to this village in any source the Tribes section of this record reached — not in the treaty rolls, not in the county histories, not in the valley scholarship, not in tribal accounts; the valley's documented government sat upriver, with Topenebee and then Leopold Pokagon, and the rapids village appears in none of the standard lists of Potawatomi villages read. No population, no founding date, and no internal record of the village exists in any source reached. No excavation of its site has been published: no site report and no site number appears in the county histories, the city history, the marker record, or the valley archaeological literature this record rests on; the state's archaeological database is restricted, and the negative is bounded, exactly, to published sources. Even the village's name is not certainly its own. The readings of Mishawaka stand unreconciled in the Story of Mishawaka section of this record — the commissioned history's M'Shehwahkeek, "swift flowing water" or "heavy timbered rapids"; the 1875 atlas's "thick woods rapids"; Howard's "Big Rapids" — and the linguistic reading, mšwakig, "at the firewood-tree land," attaches to a village at the junction of the Elkhart and St. Joseph rivers, which may not be this village at all. The trail ends with a place that can be walked, bounded by three modern streets, whose people the record cannot name — beginning with the man, if there was one man, who led them.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history, posted by the City of Mishawaka) — the village's bounds, the name M'Shehwahkeek and its translations, the departure about 1820, and the fragmentary-knowledge statement.
2. An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) — "formerly occupied by an Indian village named Mishawaka"; "thick woods rapids."
3. Chapman (1880), History of St. Joseph County, via the Farms & Crops section of this record — the cleared tract and its corn hills.
4. the The Peoples of the Rapids and The Story of Mishawaka section of this history — the chief test run whole (treaty rolls, Barce 1918, the Whickcar reservations study, tribal accounts), the village-list absence, the published-archaeology negative, and the name readings printed unreconciled.