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THE LEGEND · 1875 AND AFTER
The city's best-known story is a story — and the record says so: Every Mishawaka schoolchild learns of Princess Mishawaka: the daughter of the Shawnee chief Elkhart, who loved a white trapper the tale calls Dead Shot; of the Shawnee Grey Wolf, whose jealousy brought him to capture her; of the fight in which both men died; of the princess stabbed in the struggle, recovering, and living on until 1818, when she died aged thirty-two and was buried near what is now Lincoln Park. It is a good tale. It is also, on the evidence, a work of fiction. The story originated with Flavius J. Littlejohn — a Michigan author, politician and judge — in his collection of tales published in 1875, nearly forty years after the town was founded and nearly sixty after the princess's supposed death. In Littlejohn's own telling her name is spelled "Mishawaha." No document of the village's time — no treaty record, no trader's journal, no settler's letter — carries the princess, the chief, the trapper or the fight, and the city's own historians treat the tale as literature, not record. The name Mishawaka needs no princess to explain it: it is the Potawatomi place-name set out in the entry above, older than the town and older than the tale.
What the record does carry is the legend's second life, which is a civic fact of its own. On the Fourth of July 1909 the city staged a Historical Pageant: Jennie Skelly played Princess Mishawaka, with Frederick Eberhart as Chief Elkhart, and the pageant's canoe procession came down the river to meet the city's officials at the Cedar Street Bridge; the princess raised the city flag at the new Hotel Mishawaka, and that evening she turned the switch that lit Mishawaka's first electric streetlights, Mayor Charles Frank presiding. In the centennial year 1932 the Daughters of the American Revolution set a boulder and bronze plaque in Lincoln Park honoring the princess at her "supposed grave site," dedicated during centennial week, and a Princess Mishawaka contest named Virginia Ainlay, a Mishawaka High School student, as the centennial's princess. The marker stands without the tale's context, and many who read it take the grave for real; the record, stated plainly, is that the grave is symbolic and the princess is Littlejohn's. The city's nickname, the Princess City, descends from the legend and its pageants, not from the name's true history — a borrowed princess for a city whose real founder was a furnace. The nickname's course is part of this city's genuine history, and it is kept here as exactly that: the history of a story the city chose to tell about itself.
Sources:
- Flavius J. Littlejohn, collection of tales (1875) — the tale's origin, the heroine spelled "Mishawaha," as established in the city's historical record.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the legend's fictional standing, the 1909 Historical Pageant and the first electric streetlights, the 1932 DAR marker at Lincoln Park and the centennial princess contest.
- The History Museum, South Bend — the legend's place in the regional record, carried as tradition.