The Potawatomi village and the name

BEFORE THE TOWN

The city stands on a village's ground, and carries the village's name: When the first white settlers reached the rapids, a Potawatomi village stood on the south bank, on ground now bounded roughly by Lincolnway West, North Main Street and West Street. The Potawatomi were drawn by the same things that drew everyone after them: the ford at the rapids, the fishing, the game, and the timber. Their word for the place is carried in the city's commissioned history as M'Shehwahkeek, rendered "swift flowing water" or "heavy timbered rapids." Howard's county history of 1907 gives the name's meaning as "Big Rapids" — the town named, as he has it, for the great falls in the river at this point, "the etymology being similar to that of the word Michigan, signifying Great Lake." Modern linguistic scholarship reads the word differently again: a Potawatomi village name from the junction country of the Elkhart and St. Joseph rivers, mšwakig, "at the firewood-tree land," for the many dead trees standing there, with a Miami-Illinois cognate mihswaahkwahkiki. The three readings are printed here as they stand in their sources; the record does not reconcile them, and this history does not choose among them. What is not in dispute is the thing itself: the name is a Potawatomi place-name, taken up by the settlement that replaced the village. Howard adds a tradition worth its line: that Mishawaka had been the name of an Indian village formerly located on the site of Taylor's addition to the St. Joseph Iron Works, on the town's own ground.

The tenure ended in sickness and paper. By De Kever's account the Potawatomi presence at the rapids ended about 1820, when a smallpox epidemic so horrified the village's people that they abandoned the area. The treaty of 1821 ceded five million acres of the Potawatomi country, later treaties took the rest, and most of the Potawatomi of the valley were removed west — to Iowa, and then to Kansas. The full record of the valley's peoples — the villages, the treaty councils and the removals — belongs to the Before the City section of this record. What belongs to the Story of Mishawaka section is the sequence: the village was gone, or nearly gone, a decade before the furnace came; the settlers who platted the town in 1833 built on emptied ground, and they knew whose ground it had been, because they kept its name.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the village on the south bank, the word M'Shehwahkeek and its renderings, the smallpox abandonment about 1820, the 1821 treaty and the removals.
2. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Chapter X — "Big Rapids," and the tradition that the name belonged to an Indian village on the site of Taylor's addition.
3. The History Museum, South Bend — the M'Shehwahkeek rendering carried in the regional reference record.
4. Modern linguistic analysis of the Potawatomi place-name (mšwakig, "at the firewood-tree land"), as cited in the standard reference article on the city.