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THE WORD ITSELF · THREE READINGS, NO RULING
The readings: Mishawaka's name is a Potawatomi place-name, and the record hands down its meaning in three forms that do not reconcile. De Kever carries the word as M'Shehwahkeek, rendered "swift flowing water" or "heavy timbered rapids"; the 1875 county atlas glosses it the same way, "(thick woods rapids), or (swift waters)." Howard, in 1907, gives the meaning as "Big Rapids," the town named for the great falls in the river at this point. Modern linguistic scholarship reads the word differently again: a village name reconstructed as mšwakig, "at the firewood-tree land," for the many dead trees standing there — and, in that reading, the village the word belonged to stood not at the rapids at all but at the junction of the Elkhart and St. Joseph rivers, so that the name may have reached this ground by transfer, the settlers applying a valley village name to the townsite. The disagreement is of two kinds at once — what the word means, and which village it named — and the record prints the three readings side by side and chooses none. A city whose founding legend is a novel (see the ledger below) turns out to have a founding word that is nearly as unsettled: the name is documented; its meaning is a standing dispute among its own historians.
Sources: the Tribes section of this history — the name's three readings (De Kever's M'Shehwahkeek; the 1875 atlas gloss; Howard's "Big Rapids," 1907), the linguistic reconstruction mšwakig, "at the firewood-tree land," and the transfer question, printed there without a ruling.