The Red Men: Mishawaka Tribe No. 304 and its wigwam

In Howard's roster, 1907 · meeting in its wigwam, 1914

The tribe: The Improved Order of Red Men kept Mishawaka Tribe No. 304, with John C. Quick as sachem and George Hitesman — the roster's double penman — as secretary in 1907. The order's local units are tribes, its rooms wigwams, its officers sachems, sagamores and prophets, and its calendar is its own; the hall at 109 South Main stands in the 1921 directory as the Red Men's Hall, and the press of the lodge age catches the tribe at work: the South Bend News-Times' Mishawaka lodge column for Tuesday, 24 March 1914, reports that "Mishawaka Tribe, No. 304, Improved Order of Red Men, held its regular meeting Tuesday evening in the Red Men's wigwam," in a column that also carries the Moose at their regular meeting and a Maccabee tent set for Wednesday — Tuesday was, as the column's headline has it, busy lodge night. No record reached carries the tribe past the directory era, and its end is a named gap whose settling source is the Great Council of Indiana's tribe records.

What the order was, in the record's own terms: The dispel discipline applies to this order with particular force, because its costume invites invention. What the documented record shows is this. The order claimed descent from the Sons of Liberty of the Revolution — its period accounts say it "claims an unbroken succession" from them, and the claim is printed as a claim, in the order's own frame, not as a pedigree. Its published structure was three degrees — Adoption, Warrior and Chief — with a uniformed rank and a women's degree, the Degree of Pocahontas, for the wives, daughters and sisters of members; no Pocahontas council of Mishawaka stands in Howard's roster or the directory, and that absence is printed with the rest. And the order's membership, as a modern museum's published account of it states plainly, was an organization "for white people that patterns its costumes, rituals and terminology after early Native Americans" — a white men's benefit and social order in borrowed Indian dress, its Mishawaka ground being, as the Before the City record of this history shows, ground the actual peoples of the St. Joseph valley had been removed from within living memory of the tribe's founding generation. The tribe's real business was the lodge age's ordinary business — fellowship, regalia, the sick visit and the benefit — and it is documented at that size and no larger.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), p. 345 — Mishawaka Tribe No. 304, its sachem and secretary; read first-hand.
2. South Bend News-Times, 25 March 1914 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the Mishawaka lodge column: the tribe's regular meeting in the Red Men's wigwam; read first-hand.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., South Bend City Directory, 1921 — the Red Men's Hall, 109 S. Main, as carried in the Private Clubs section.
4. John L. Forkner, History of Madison County, Indiana, Vol. I (1914) — the order's published account of itself: the claimed Sons of Liberty succession, the three degrees, the Degree of Pocahontas, the uniformed rank; and the Clarke Historical Museum's published account of the Improved Order of Red Men — the membership and the borrowed forms, stated in its words.