The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1932 · THE TABLET AT LINCOLN PARK
The tablet: Before any state marker stood in this city, Mishawaka marked its own founding — in bronze, and out of a novel. The monument of 1932: a statue on a native boulder provided by the Mishawaka Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the tablet given by the Lions Club, erected by the citizens of Mishawaka for the centennial. Its inscription, quoted entire in the Folklore section, reads: "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." Every element of that paragraph — the princess, the 1818 death at thirty-two, the burial near the spot, the two wars, the naming of the city in her honor — descends from Flavius J. Littlejohn's Legends of Michigan and the Old North West, a work of fiction published in 1875, which is the first and only early source for any of it, and which does not even contain the death, the grave or the naming: the tablet added those. The tablet still stands on the South River Walk Trail at Lincoln Park, photographed fully legible in May 2024, and it carries no word anywhere on it that the woman it describes came out of a book. The Folklore section prints the bronze and the record side by side and harmonizes neither — a city is entitled to its monument, and a history is obliged to its correction, and the two stand in the same park.
Sources: the Folklore section of this history — the Princess Mishawaka monument tablet (1932), inscription transcribed in full from the Historical Marker Database entry (photographed 21 May 2024; South River Walk Trail at Lincoln Park, Lincolnway West at Baker Street); Littlejohn, Legends of Michigan and the Old North West (1875), the tale's first form; the tale's three forms and the documentary spine beneath them, printed there whole.