The Succession: What Became Roads, What Vanished

The successor record divides the old trails three ways. The first way is absorption: a trail taken up, straightened, taxed, and graded into a road. The Dearborn trace's traffic was absorbed this way in pieces — into the mail road after 1795, into the county's road system as the commissioners laid roads from 1831 forward, and finally into the named highways of the next century — but the absorption on this ground was of the traffic, not of a surveyed trail line: the corridors file's road record begins with the Vistula Road, authorized in February 1832, running from South Bend through the new town to the Elkhart County line, and it is the Vistula line — a legislative creation, laid on section-line geography north of the trace's probable course — that became Second Street, then the Lincoln Highway, then SR 2 and US 33, then SR 933. The traffic moved a mile north to the surveyed road; the trace kept its name on the south side and its status as a local street. That is the becoming, at trail size: the trail's successor is not the highway. The highway is the successor of the road the legislature built instead of it.

The second way is bypass at the scale of the state. The land file settles that the Michigan Road, the great state road of the 1830s, never entered this township — Chapman's own route carries it through South Bend by way of the portage — so the largest road-building of the trail era passed this ground by, and Mishawaka's share of the succession ran through its own Vistula Road and the river. The third way is vanishing, and it accounts for nearly the whole local web. The village paths at the rapids, the landing paths, the sugar-camp paths Auten watched in use, the bank paths between the village and the portage: none was ever surveyed, petitioned, or named in a record, and when the village emptied — a decade before the first settlers arrived, on the tribes file's record — the paths lost their makers, their maintenance, and their memory in one generation. They did not become anything. They are recoverable now only as a structure: a landing implies paths to it, and this section prints the implication labeled as one, in the network article above, and nowhere as a line.

One pre-road line remains legible on the modern map, and it is the trace itself — legible not as tread but as name and rough course: Dragoon Trail, the street, running the city's south side from the motherhouse's address in the west toward Osceola in the east. A street is not a trail, and this section does not call it one. It is the trail's monument: the one place where the modern network of movement still carries the old network's name, on approximately the old network's ground.