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The checklist asks for every stockade and post in sequence, with garrison dates. On Mishawaka ground the sequence is empty, and this entry prints the negative at full size because the valley around the city was not empty. No fort, stockade, blockhouse or standing military post was ever planted on the ground that became Mishawaka — not in the French period, not in the British, not in the American. The county histories, Chapman in 1880 and Howard in 1907, whose military chapters the military fragment works whole, record no post here; the Story of Mishawaka section's early record explains why: this reach of the St. Joseph was a Potawatomi country of villages, portages and trade, crossed by the Dragoon trace the trails section follows — a road soldiers marched, not a ground they garrisoned. The valley's real post stands at its eastern end, boundary-printed at its true size: Fort Wayne, planted by General Anthony Wayne's army in the autumn of 1794 at the Maumee forks, garrisoned in succession and rebuilt across the following decades — the post from which the region's military geography was run, and the post this city's soldiers of the early wars were mustered under, at a distance. The nearer posts were posts of trade, not of war: Coquillard's trading house at the south bend and the fur posts of the river's course were private establishments under license, without garrison or flag. What military organization Mishawaka itself raised was the volunteer company of the armory-less kind — Company D of the 3rd Regiment, Indiana National Guard, 1891–92, the only Guard company the volunteers' record documents, kept in the private-clubs and volunteers sections. The forts entry therefore closes as it opened: the sequence was run against the whole record, the nearest garrison stands seventy miles east with its dates, and on this ground the army passed through, recruited, and never stayed.