The Native Nations of Mishawaka: The Peoples of the Rapids Ground

Tribes · The Peoples of the Rapids Ground

Mishawaka's tribal record is a short record standing inside a long one, and this section prints it at exactly that proportion. The long record is the St. Joseph valley's: a river the French first wrote down as the river of the Miamis, a Miami town at the portage four miles below this ground, a century in which the valley became Potawatomi country governed from villages opposite present Niles, a treaty series that took the whole valley between 1828 and 1833, a forced removal that emptied most of it in 1838–1843, and one Catholic band — Pokagon's — that negotiated the right to stay and is a sovereign nation on this river still. All of that touches Mishawaka's ground, and all of it is told here at the size this ground's own documents give it. The short record is Mishawaka's own: one Potawatomi village on the south bank at the rapids, named in the county histories and in the city's commissioned history, holding a small cleared tract whose corn hills outlasted it by years; a name in three unreconciled readings; an abandonment dated about 1820 by a single modern account; and then silence — no chief named for this village, no reserve drawn around it, no excavation report, no mound, in any source. The thinness is stated wherever it occurs, because a village that left a city's name deserves its record printed whole — and whole, here, includes the edges of what is not known.

The peoples in their own names

The Potawatomi call themselves Neshnabé, a word cognate with Anishinaabe, and in their own language their nation is Bodéwadmi; the Pokagon Band's citizens carry the collective name Pokégan Bodwéwadmik dbéndagwzéwad — the Pokagon Potawatomis, they belong to — in the band's published record. The Potawatomi are one of the Council of Three Fires, the long alliance with the Ojibwe and the Odawa. The Miami call themselves Myaamia — Myaamiaki in the plural — which the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma renders "the Downstream People," for the riverine country their history begins in. This section uses the peoples' own names where the record is theirs and the treaty clerks' spellings — Pottawatomie, Potowatami — only inside the instruments' own words, where the spelling is itself part of the document. Two spellings of the valley's principal chief's name run through the whole record, Topenebee and Topinabee, and one of his father's, Nanaquiba and Aniquiba; the variants are printed as their sources give them and are never silently standardised away, because a reader checking this record against the treaty rolls will meet both.

The order of the telling matters and is set by the sources themselves. The first history of this valley is not a French document. It is the Myaamia people's own account of their beginning, set on this river, and it stands in the Miami entry below before any treaty is opened. The treaty record, when it comes, is printed as what it was: a series of instruments written by one party, signed under pressure the other party's own histories describe in plain terms, and afterward interpreted — by a Michigan supreme court justice in 1841, by the Indian Claims Commission a century later, and by Congress in 1994 — in ways that sometimes reversed what the instruments were used to do. Where a tribal nation's published account and a county history tell the same event differently, both stand, attributed, and this section does not choose between a people's account of itself and a settler history's account of that people.

The village at the rapids: what the written record establishes

The village is documented; almost everything about it beyond its place and its cornfield is not: The fullest modern statement is the city's own commissioned history. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, records that "the original residents of the land that became Mishawaka were the Potawatomi Indians, the most populous tribe in the St. Joseph Valley," that the Potawatomi "had numerous villages in the region, including one on the south bank of the St. Joseph River located in the area bounded today by Lincolnway West and North Main and West Streets," and that they were "drawn to this location by the ease of transport the river provided, a ford near a natural rapids, abundant fish and game, and access to timber." The county record behind him says the same thing in older words. The illustrated historical atlas of 1875, in its history of Mishawaka, states that the land Hurd first purchased "was formerly occupied by an Indian village named Mishawaka," and Howard's county history of 1907 carries the tradition 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. Chapman, in 1880, adds the one physical detail any of them gives, and it is carried in the farms leg of this record and repeated here because it is this section's single piece of ground evidence: the Indians had a small tract of land cleared at the village site, where "the large corn hills, which were of a conical shape, and about two feet high, remained there for several years after this country was settled."

That is the whole of the direct record, and its limits deserve their own paragraph. No source reached for this section names the village's chief, counts its houses or its people, dates its founding, or describes its government, its burials, or its trade. No trader's journal, treaty roll, or settler's letter in the record reached speaks from the village or to it. The village enters writing retrospectively — in an atlas of 1875, a county history of 1880, another of 1907, and a city history of the present century — in every case after it was gone, and in every case briefly, as the preface to a town. De Kever states the reason with a plainness this section adopts as its own finding: "Knowledge of the Potawatomis' life in the land later known as Mishawaka is fragmentary because the Indians had been absent from the region for a decade before the first permanent white settlers arrived in the area." What can honestly be said is therefore said at that strength: a Potawatomi village stood on the south bank at the rapids, on ground now bounded roughly by Lincolnway West, North Main Street and West Street; it farmed a small cleared tract at what became Taylor's Addition; its name, in the form the settlers took it up, is the city's name. The entries that follow test everything else the record is asked to carry — the name's meaning, the village's nation before the Potawatomi, its chiefs, its treaties, its end — one claim at a time.

The name in three readings, printed whole

The name is a Potawatomi place-name; its meaning comes down in three readings that do not reconcile, and the Story of Mishawaka section of this record prints them side by side without choosing. This section adds the one fact the dispute itself establishes. De Kever carries the word as M'Shehwahkeek, rendered "swift flowing water" or "heavy timbered rapids" — a name for the place, the rapids themselves; the 1875 atlas glosses the village name the same way, "(thick woods rapids), or (swift waters)." Howard in 1907 gives the 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 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 but at the junction of the Elkhart and St. Joseph rivers, with a Miami-Illinois cognate mihswaahkwahkiki beside it. The disagreement is therefore of two kinds at once: what the word means, and which village it named. If the linguistic reading is right about the junction, then the name reached the rapids by transfer — the settlers applying a valley village name to the townsite village — a mechanism the record neither confirms nor excludes. What no reading disputes is the sequence the Story of Mishawaka section states: the name is older than the town, older than the 1875 tale that invented a princess to explain it, and was already the post office's name in the spring of 1834 when Henry Yerrington suggested it, because it was the name the ground carried. The Princess Mishawaka herself — Littlejohn's "Mishawaha" of 1875 — is fiction, and her dispelling stands whole in the Story of Mishawaka section and folklore legs of this record; she is named here only so that no reader mistakes this section's silence about her for an omission. There was a real village. It needs no princess, and it had, so far as any document shows, none.

What archaeology does and does not establish on this ground

The search was run as a test, and its result is a negative printed with the search shown. Indiana's archaeological site files are not public records a history can cite — the state's SHAARD database is restricted precisely so that site locations cannot be looted from it — so the honest statement is the bounded one: if a site file for the village exists, it is not a published source, and this section does not invent its contents. The corn hills themselves, two feet high and conical, surviving "for several years after this country was settled," are the closest thing to a ground observation the record holds: a farmed surface, noticed and measured by the generation that ploughed over it, and preserved only because Chapman wrote the sentence down. Nothing of the village's material record — no house pattern, no refuse, no dated object — is described anywhere in the sources reached.

The valley around the ground is not equally silent, and the contrast is printed as a boundary, not borrowed as this ground's evidence. Up the river in Berrien County, Michigan, the Moccasin Bluff site was excavated by the University of Michigan's museum in 1948, and the federal NAGPRA inventory notice for its remains, published in the Federal Register in October 2022, states the valley frame in the government's own words: a relationship of shared group identity can reasonably be traced between the site's people and the present-day Potawatomi and Miami, "based on archeological and historical records that indicate both Tribes had a predominant presence in the St. Joseph River Valley from the time of first contact with the French through the early-1800s," the two tribes known to have had "close and friendly relations in this area," with the Potawatomi leader Moccasin presiding over a village near that bluff in the early 1800s. That is Michigan ground and another reach's village; it establishes the valley's depth of occupation, the two nations' joint presence in it, and the kind of evidence a dug site produces — none of which may be carried four miles downriver and laid on the Mishawaka townsite.

The Miami test: a valley nation, and this ground

The test divides, and both halves print: For the valley, the Miami footprint is positive and early. The Elkhart river marker in the valley's own marker record states it without hedge: "The Miami were the first recorded tribe known to have lived in the valley before 1668. The main village was located east of the St. Joseph River at the present day site of Niles, Michigan. Other villages were recorded in present day South Bend and Waterford Mills, Indiana." The river's first French name carries the same fact: La Salle called it the river of the Miamis, from the nation whose towns then stood on its banks, and when his party reached the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage in December 1679 — the marker's telling dates the passage 1678, the expedition relations December 1679, and the division is printed as it stands — the town at the carrying place was a Miami town, the village from which a French memoir of the next generation measures the portage to the Kankakee's source. It was to this valley's Miami, gathered at their St. Joseph town, that La Salle returned in May 1681 to make his alliance. Above all the documents stands the nation's own account, which the Myaamia Center of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma publishes as the people's beginning: the Myaamia emerged from the water at Saakiiweeyonki, "the Confluence," on Saakiiweesiipiwi, the St. Joseph River — in the telling Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) gave J. P. Dunn in the early 1900s — and built their first village there, before going downstream to build their towns at the confluences and portages of the Wabash country. The tribe's publications place the emergence in two wordings this record carries side by side, as South Bend's record carries them: the community history names "the St. Joseph River near South Bend, Indiana" as the emergence river and Saakiiweeyonki as the spot, while other tribal tellings describe the people emerging where the St. Joseph meets Lake Michigan — a tribal officer's account given at Goshen College names Saakiiweeyonki at the river's mouth the same way. The wordings are not reconciled here. What is constant is that the Myaamia's own recorded beginning is set on this river system — and that is the first history of Mishawaka's river, though it is not set on Mishawaka's bank.

For this ground, the test is negative at the strength the question requires. No source reached names a Miami village, town, camp, or chief on the Mishawaka townsite — at the rapids, on either bank, at any date. The Miami villages the record does name in Indiana stand at Niles's reach, at the portage by the bend, and at Waterford Mills on the Elkhart River: upriver, downriver, and on the tributary — never at this fall of water. By the time any document names the village at the rapids, it names it Potawatomi, and the valley's central population movement explains the succession: across the French century the Miami centre of gravity moved southeast to Kekionga and the Wabash towns, and the St. Joseph valley filled with their Potawatomi kin and allies — one scholarly summary of the northern Indiana record puts it as the mounted Potawatomi slowly driving the Miami line south and east until the Wabash marked its boundary, a framing printed here as that summary's, from the Indiana Magazine of History's reservations study, and not as this section's own verdict on a kinship the federal record itself describes as close and friendly. The marker's explanation for the valley's Miami leaving is printed at the marker's own strength: "Little is known why the Miami left the valley. Some speculate they were driven out by other more aggressive tribes. Others say they sought a better trading center near Fort Wayne, Indiana. For whatever the reason, by 1706 the Miami ceased to inhabit northern Indiana" — the last clause is wider than the record under it, since the Miami held Indiana country on the Wabash for another century and a half, and it is carried here as the marker's sentence, not adopted. The sober finding is the narrow one: Miami people unquestionably used this river — it was, in their own account, their first river — and Miami hunting, travel and trade through the rapids reach is the natural reading of a valley they held; but a Miami village at Mishawaka is not in the record, and this section does not plant one there. The village the documents give this ground is Potawatomi, and the Miami stand in this section at the size the documents give them here: the valley's first recorded nation, the river's namers, and this ground's predecessors at one remove — upriver and downriver, not on the townsite.

The Potawatomi valley and its chiefs: this ground's share

By the treaty century the St. Joseph valley was Bodéwadmi country, and its government sat upriver. The line the valley record names runs from Nanaquiba — Aniquiba in the other spelling — the revered chief of the river's St. Joseph towns, to his son Topenebee, principal chief of the St. Joseph Potawatomi, whose villages stood on the river opposite present Niles and whose name runs through the treaties from the 1790s to his death in 1826, and after him to Leopold Pokagon, who succeeded him as head of the valley's Potawatomi. Barce's 1918 study in the Indiana Magazine of History prints Topenebee signing the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 as the first of the "Putawatames of the River St. Joseph," and the reservations study in the same journal states that both Aniquiba and Topenebee "lived on the St. Joseph River in Berrien County, Michigan," as principal chiefs "at the head of both the state and religious affairs of all the Potawatomi tribes." The instruments fix the geography exactly: the supplementary articles of 27 September 1833 describe "the tract of land on the Saint Joseph River, opposite the town of Niles, and extending to the line of the State of Indiana, on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated, supposed to contain about 49 sections." Pokagon's own village stood, in Buechner's 1933 account for the Indiana Historical Society, "in what is now the southeast part of Bertrand Township, Berrien County, not far from the Old Sauk Trail and about six miles north and west of the present city of South Bend." These were the valley's seats of power: Michigan ground, at the state line, four to ten miles from the rapids as the river runs.

Mishawaka's village stands in that system at the size the record gives it — which is to say, as a village of the St. Joseph Potawatomi world, downstream of its chiefs, and with no chief of its own in any document reached. That negative is this section's sharpest finding and it is printed as one: in the treaty rolls, the county histories, the valley scholarship and the tribal accounts read, no headman, speaker, or band is ever attached to the village at the rapids. The explanation is probably the one De Kever gives for the whole subject: the village was already abandoned when the written record of this place begins, a dozen years before the first treaty that could have named its chief was negotiated at the river. A village that emptied about 1820 leaves no signature on the instruments of 1828 and 1833; it leaves a cornfield, a name, and a paragraph in the town histories. What governed it while it stood, this record cannot say — only whose valley it stood in, and that valley, by every document, was Topenebee's and then Pokagon's.

The treaties as they touch this ground, instrument by instrument

The townsite's title was extinguished in 1828, at a mission on this river — and the precision matters: The tribal side of the instruments is this section's; the purchases, surveys and land sales that followed them are the land leg's, and stand here only where a cession line crosses the townsite. The series opens, for this ground, with an instrument that did not take it. The Treaty of Chicago of 29 August 1821, by which the Potawatomi ceded some five million acres of Michigan country — De Kever's summary for this town says they "ceded five million acres in a strip of land ten miles south of the Indiana state line, and subsequent treaties deprived them of the remainder of their land in the region," a compression printed here as his — left Indiana's St. Joseph valley in Potawatomi title. The Treaty of the Mississinewa, 16 October 1826 (7 Stat. 295), took a Maumee-side tract up Fort Wayne's St. Joseph, a ten-mile strip along Lake Michigan, and the Michigan Road grant; the valley of the St. Joseph of Lake Michigan it likewise left untouched, as South Bend's record establishes from the text. The Treaty of St. Joseph of 19 September 1827 (7 Stat. 305) consolidated dispersed Michigan bands by exchanging scattered reserved tracts — ninety-nine and a half sections in the whole — for one continuous ninety-nine-section reservation, the Nottawaseppi reserve in present Michigan: an instrument about Michigan ground and Michigan villages, whose relevance here is that it shows the method already at work a year before this ground was reached — reserves gathered, moved, and held on terms the next instruments would unwind.

The taking of this ground is the second cession of the Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317), concluded "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey Mission, Isaac McCoy's Baptist mission by present Niles — between Lewis Cass and Pierre Menard for the United States and the Potawatomi. Its first article took the Michigan side, from the river's mouth up the St. Joseph to a point halfway between two named villages, La-vache-qui-pisse and Macousin village, then to the state line and the lake. Its second took northern Indiana: beginning on the line run in 1817 due east from the lake's southern extreme, at the point due south of the head of the Kankakee's most easterly branch — the portage headwaters four miles below this ground are a boundary call inside the instrument — running south ten miles, then by the corners of the reservations at Flatbelly's and Seek's villages and the lines of former cessions to the Ohio line. The Mishawaka townsite lies inside that second cession: in the Indian Claims Commission's later accounting the two cessions are Michigan Area 145 and Indiana Area 146, and the consideration the article itemises is a permanent annuity of two thousand dollars, a further one thousand a year for twenty years, thirty thousand dollars in goods, and the labourers, blacksmith, tobacco, iron and education provisions the text enumerates. Who ceded, in the instrument's own frame, was "the Potowatami tribe of Indians" as one party — the treaty knows no Mishawaka village and no Mishawaka signature, for the reason the chiefs entry gives: the village at the rapids had no living voice at the council, and its ground was signed away as part of a valley, by the valley's chiefs, at a mission upriver. The third article granted individual tracts, to be located on the second cession where the President might direct after survey, to named persons "all of whom are Indians by descent" — two sections to the chief Au-bee-nan-bee, a section to Louison "to include his house and cornfield," halves and sections to a roll of Potawatomi women and their families. None of the grants in the text read is located on the Mishawaka townsite, and Article 2's one local clause looks elsewhere: three labourers, four months a year for ten years, "to work for the band living upon the reservation South of the St. Joseph" — a reservation south of the river that the instrument does not further place, and whose identification the record reached does not settle; it is printed as an open clause, not assigned to this ground.

What 1828 left standing near this ground, the instruments of 1832 and 1833 cleared or saved, and the two operations must not be blurred. The Tippecanoe treaties of October 1832 ceded most of the remaining Potawatomi land in northwestern and north-central Indiana and carved the last reserves out of the cessions — among them, in the treaty of 27 October 1832, "the reservation at Po-ca-gan's village for his band," expressly reserved from the cession: the valley chief's town held out of the sale a year before Chicago. The Treaty of Chicago, 26 September 1833 (7 Stat. 431), took some five million acres in Illinois and Wisconsin and bound the United Nation of Chippewa, Ottawa and Potawatomi to removal west within three years; its supplementary articles of the next day, 27 September (7 Stat. 442), took from the Michigan-side chiefs the Nottawaseppi reserve, the ninety-nine sections of the 1827 treaty, and the Topenebee and Pokagon villages tract — the forty-nine sections opposite Niles "extending to the line of the State of Indiana" — and made those chiefs parties to the Chicago treaty for one hundred thousand dollars. The tract's southern edge is the Indiana line: the villages tract touched this county at its northern border and did not enter it, and the Mishawaka townsite, fourteen miles of river below that line's nearest approach to the rapids ground, is not in the 1833 instruments at all — its title had already passed in 1828. Inside the supplementary articles, however, sits the provision the next entries follow: the one that let a band stay.

The reserve test on and near this ground

The question a reader of the treaties brings to a townsite — was any of it ever a reserve? — is run here name by name, and the answer for the Mishawaka townsite is no. No band reservation in any instrument read is drawn on, around, or near the rapids ground: the reserves the series creates stand at Pokagon's village and Nottawaseppi in Michigan (1827, 1832), at Twin Lakes in present Marshall County for Menominee's Yellow River band (1832), and in the scatter of individual sections the 1828 treaty's third article and its companion instruments granted to named persons of Indian descent, none located by the texts on this ground. The nearest reserve geography is instructive precisely because it stops where it stops: the 1833 villages tract reaches the Indiana line and no farther south; the Twin Lakes reserve sits a county away; and the one reservation clause in the 1828 text that mentions ground south of the St. Joseph — the labourers for "the band living upon the reservation South of the St. Mishawaka's ground was never reserved ground. It was village ground first, then simply ceded ground, which is why its Indian title could be extinguished wholesale in a single article in 1828 and why no later instrument ever has to mention it again: there was nothing left on it, in the law the treaties made, to reserve, restore, or remove. The human remainder — who was actually still living in the valley, and what became of them — is the next two entries' subject, and it is larger than the paper remainder.

The end of the village: the smallpox account and its limits

One modern account dates the village's end; no contemporary record reached confirms or contradicts it: De Kever's sentence is the whole of the evidence, and it is printed as his account, at his strength: "The Potawatomi presence continued until about 1820, the year in which a smallpox epidemic so horrified the Indians that they abandoned the area and never returned." The Story of Mishawaka section of this record carries the same account in the same terms — "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" — and this section adds the source criticism the claim requires. No period document reached records an epidemic at the rapids in or about 1820: the atlas of 1875 and the county histories of 1880 and 1907, which preserve the village, its name, and its corn hills, do not in the passages read give the epidemic or the date. The claim stands on the commissioned city history alone, written a century and three-quarters after the event it dates, from sources it does not name at that sentence. It is neither adopted nor discarded here: an epidemic abandonment is a documented Potawatomi experience elsewhere in the valley's world, the date fits the one hard fact in the record — that the village was gone, or nearly gone, a decade before the furnace came in 1833 — and nothing in the record contradicts it. But the distinction between the village at the rapids and the Potawatomi in this place must be printed with it, because the same record that carries De Kever's 1820 ending carries Chapman's closing sentence for the county: the Potawatomi were still here, in the valley and the county, to be "removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government" — twenty years after the rapids village emptied. Both are in the record and both are true at their own scope: a settlement ended about 1820, on the only account that dates it; a people's presence on the surrounding ground ended by federal removal in the 1840s. The village's people, when they left the rapids, went somewhere — upriver to the chiefs' towns opposite Niles, into the valley's other villages, or farther — and no source reached says where. That silence is the village's last fact, and it is printed unsupplemented.

Removal's course on this ground, 1838–1843

The forced march the Potawatomi remember as the Trail of Death did not begin on this ground, and this section will not borrow it. It began at Twin Lakes in present Marshall County, one county south, where Menominee's band held the reserve the 1832 settlement had granted and which Menominee maintained the later instruments could not take — his written protest of 4 November 1837 charges that his signature to the Yellow River treaty of 5 August 1836 was forged. When that disputed treaty's deadline passed on 5 August 1838, Governor David Wallace authorised General John Tipton to remove the band by force; Tipton's militia surrounded the Twin Lakes village at the end of August, the rolls recorded 859 people, and on 4 September 1838 the column set out — 660 miles in sixty-one days to the Osage River country at present Osawatomie, Kansas. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation's own published account of the march — the account this section follows for the removed nation's own telling, printed as the nation's — records that militia members burned the band's fields and houses as the wagons departed, and that the leaders rode shackled in a wagon at the column's head; the standard accounts carried in South Bend's record count forty-two dead on the road, twenty-eight of them children, and 756 arriving. Mishawaka's tie to the Trail of Death is exact and is threefold at most, as South Bend's record states it for its own ground and as it holds here: it was the removal of this valley's nation, from the county adjoining this one, under the same treaty system that had taken this ground in 1828; its missionary thread runs through the valley's Catholic Potawatomi, whom its priest, Father Benjamin Marie Petit, had served from November 1837 before he followed the column and died of the journey in February 1839; and its lesson was read by every nation still negotiating — the Miami, bargaining their own removal afterward, knew, in the Indiana Magazine of History's phrase, "the abrupt manner in which Menominee's band of Potawatomi were conducted west," and bargained accordingly. The route of the march itself ran south and west from Twin Lakes through Logansport and Danville; it did not pass the rapids, and no Mishawaka encampment, death, or marker of the Trail of Death stands in this record.

This ground's own removal was the quieter operation that followed. The Indiana removal of 1840 was a separate enterprise from Michigan's, run under the treaty provisions of 1834 and 1836 on its own appropriation — General Samuel Milroy first in charge, then General Hugh Brady as superintendent of emigration — and the conductor's contract went to the valley's own trader, Alexis Coquillard of South Bend, who spent May 1840 reporting to Brady that British agents in Canada were bidding for the Potawatomi — ten dollars a head plus clothing and provisions to remove to Canada instead — and urging that the western emigration begin before the offer took. Chapman's county history states the outcome in the one sentence this section quotes entire, because it is the county's own record of its ground: "Various treaties having been made with the Indians by Governor Cass, then Governor of Michigan, and others, and their lands having been purchased at various times and places, they were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard." The destination word is Chapman's; the caravan record of the 1840 parties — one column of about five hundred Indiana and Michigan Potawatomi crossing the Mississippi at Quincy that fall, Abram Burnett, William Burnett's son, interpreting — puts Coquillard's people on the road across Missouri toward the Kansas reservations, and the two statements stand together here, unharmonised, as they stand in South Bend's record. How many of the removed came from Mishawaka's own ground the muster rolls, not the narratives, would say exactly; the rolls survive and underlie the modern compilations, but no Mishawaka figure stands in any narrative source reached, and the leg prints the gap rather than a share of a county total. An unknown number escaped the gathering entirely — to Canada, into the woods, and to the Pokagon villages, which is where the record turns next.

The ones who stayed: Pokagon's band, whole

Against the removal of the valley stands one band's refusal, documented at every step: Leopold Pokagon (about 1775–1841) succeeded Topenebee on his death in 1826 as head of the St. Joseph valley's Potawatomi, and his strategy had two parts, an alliance and a document. The alliance was the Catholic Church. The valley's Catholic record begins in dispute, and the dispute is printed whole: Buechner's 1933 account has Father John Frederic Reze arrive in July 1830 and baptise Pokagon himself, the head chief, with twelve others; the Pokagon scholarship carried in South Bend's record has Father Stephen Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States, arrive in August 1830 to raise the mission Pokagon's people had asked for, with Pokagon himself baptised in 1833. The accounts differ on the year, the priest, and the baptism; they agree on the substance, which is what this section prints as settled: in 1830 the valley's Potawatomi sought and received a Catholic mission, the Catholic Potawatomi of southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana acknowledged Pokagon as their leader, and the affiliation became the band's public identity — in the tribal historians' phrase carried in the band's published record, the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph River valley affirmed a new identity as the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The document came at Chicago in September 1833. When the United Nation's treaty was written, Pokagon held out, and the scholarly account of the council — W. Benjamin Secunda's Notre Dame dissertation — records that Commissioner George B. Porter agreed to add a supplemental article allowing Pokagon's band to remain in Michigan "on account of their religious creed," and that only when the stipulation stood written did Pokagon sign. The 1994 Senate report on the band's restoration states the result in the government's own words: in the Treaty of Chicago (1833) "the Pokagon Band is the only Potawatomi Band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan and receive their share of prior treaty payments in Michigan."

The exception was then defended on the ground and on paper. With treaty money and the sale of family reservations, Pokagon bought land in fee — 874 acres on Silver Creek in present Cass County, Michigan, in the summary of James A. Clifton's history of the band, The Pokagons, 1683–1983 — ground held as private property that no removal order could reach. The band's villages, in the published tribal record, ran from Hartford, Rush Lake, Dowagiac, Niles and Buchanan in Michigan to South Bend in Indiana, united under the common identity the band's name in its own language states; Mishawaka is not named in that list in any version reached, and the absence is printed plainly — the staying band's Indiana seat in its own account is South Bend, four miles below this ground, and Mishawaka's claim on the band is the valley's claim: same river, same county, same treaty, no village of the band's named on this bank. When the Army under General Hugh Brady moved against the Catholic Potawatomi anyway in the removal drive of 1840–41, Pokagon took the treaty to Associate Justice Epaphroditus Ransom of the Michigan Supreme Court, whose written opinion that the band had a right to remain Brady read — and honoured. Pokagon died on 8 July 1841 with his people still on their ground. The years after his death were not quiet: disputes among his heirs, the band, and the Church over the Silver Creek lands disrupted the community in the courts, and many Silver Creek families removed to Brush Creek, Rush Lake and other settlements in southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana — a dispersal inside the homeland, not out of it. His son Simon Pokagon (about 1830–1899) carried the unremoved band's case into print in its own voice: The Red Man's Rebuke, the birch-bark pamphlet of 1893, and the novel published the year of his death. What the band lacked for a century and a half was not existence but the federal government's acknowledgment of it; Congress supplied that in the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Restoration Act, Public Law 103-323, signed 21 September 1994, whose findings name the band "the descendant of, and political successor to, the signatories" of eleven treaties, from Greenville in 1795 through Chicago in 1833 — the 1827 and 1828 St. Joseph treaties among them, the very instruments that took this ground — and record that its citizens "continue to reside close to their ancestral homeland in the St. Joseph River Valley in southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana." The band today is a sovereign tribal nation headquartered at Dowagiac, Michigan, with more than 4,300 citizens in its published figures and a ten-county service area across southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana that includes St. Joseph County — this county, and therefore this ground — with a satellite office in South Bend. Its Indiana trust land and its Four Winds South Bend casino stand in South Bend, on that city's ground, and are boundary-printed here in one line for exactly that reason: the nation's return to Indiana soil is the valley's fact, and the parcel is South Bend's. On Mishawaka's own ground the band holds, in the record reached, no trust parcel and no seat — its presence here is the presence of the homeland itself: this was Pokagon Potawatomi country before it was a townsite, and in the band's own published framing it is ancestral homeland still.

The modern nations' own accounts of this valley

Three nations publish accounts that touch this valley, and this entry prints each as its owner's, at the size each actually gives the ground. The Pokagon Band's published history — in its own materials and in the congressional record its restoration produced — frames the valley as unbroken homeland: the band is the descendant and political successor of the Potawatomi bands that signed the eleven treaties; in 1828, in the restoration report's summary, "the Pokagons and other Potawatomi bands sold their lands on the St. Joseph River, the heart of their Michigan territory"; in 1833 the band alone refused removal and negotiated the right to remain; and its citizens reside today "close to their ancestral homeland in the St. Joseph River valley of southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana." Mishawaka is not named in the band's published historical summaries reached — its named Indiana place is South Bend — and this section prints that as the account stands: the band's own history speaks of a river and a homeland, and this ground's place in it is as part of that homeland, not as a named episode. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the largest of the Potawatomi nations and the one descended from the removed Potawatomi of the Woods — the southern Michigan and northern Indiana bands, including, in the nation's published genealogy of itself, the Mission Band from St. Joseph — tells the valley from the other side of removal: its Cultural Heritage Center's encyclopedia carries the Trail of Death as the nation's defining Indiana memory, and its published history of the removal, as the Indiana History Blog's account quotes its curators, describes the mechanism without softening — a band of 859 Potawatomi, their leaders shackled, set out under militia guard on 4 September 1838 while "militia members burned both fields and houses as the dejected members of the wagon train departed." The congressional resolution of 2020 acknowledging the removal, which the nation's advocacy helped carry, states the treaty pressure in the record's own terms: between 1834 and 1837 a series of instruments the resolution calls the "Whiskey Treaties" ceded the remaining Potawatomi land in Indiana under pressure from United States negotiators. For Mishawaka the Citizen Potawatomi account has the same shape as the Pokagon one, inverted: it names the system, the county's removal years, and the road — and it does not name this town, because the town's village had been empty for eighteen years when the columns formed. The Myaamia account, third, is the oldest of the three and the only one set in the valley before any European document: the emergence at Saakiiweeyonki on the St. Joseph, the first village at the confluence, and the going downstream to the Wabash towns, as the tribe's own entry above prints it — with the tribe's two wordings of the place, near South Bend and at the river's mouth, carried unreconciled. Read together, the three published accounts agree on the frame this section has used throughout and on nothing being owed to the townsite beyond it: a homeland, a taking, a removal, a staying — and a rapids village that enters none of their tellings by name. The town's paragraph about the village, and the nations' silence about the town, are both printed here, because both are the record.

Burial and mound record, at sober size

This entry follows the house rule for ground of this kind: what the published record establishes, stated soberly, with no grave-hunting detail and no direction beyond what published sources state for the public record. Three things stand in it, and a fourth that does not. First, the one burial the town's public record points to is not a burial: the boulder and bronze plaque the Daughters of the American Revolution set in Lincoln Park in the centennial year 1932 honour Princess Mishawaka at her "supposed grave site" — the grave of a character in an 1875 tale of fiction, whose story the Story of Mishawaka section and folklore legs of this record test and dispel whole. Second, the valley's one published cemetery of the treaty-century villages stands on Michigan ground, at the boundary size the rule requires: Buechner's 1933 account places, on a high knoll in section 22, not far from the west bank of the St. Joseph, "the Indian cemetery where some of Pokagon's people are buried," near the site of Pokagon's village in Bertrand Township — that is the published record's whole statement, and it is reprinted here without addition, approach, or elaboration, as the record of the staying band's dead on their own ground upriver. Third, for Mishawaka's own ground the record is empty at exactly the point a reader most wants it filled: no burial ground, grave, or mound on the townsite is named in the county histories, the city history, the marker record, or any published source reached. The village at the rapids had, in the nature of villages, its dead and its way of laying them; where they lie is not in the written record, and this section does not speculate a location for them — the corn hills are documented, and the graves are not, and the difference is allowed to stand as the record's own shape.

The mound test was run separately, because the nineteenth-century literature has a mound vocabulary of its own that must not be smuggled onto a historic village. Cyrus Thomas's Bureau of Ethnology survey, Burial Mounds of the Northern Sections of the United States (1887), reports the mound districts of the northern states county by county and culture by culture; no mound on Mishawaka's ground is reported in it, and the conical corn hills of Chapman's sentence — two feet high, in a cleared corn tract, surviving a few years into settlement — are an agricultural surface, described by their own observer as corn hills, and are not mounds in any sense the survey or this section uses. The search of the published valley and county record for a Mishawaka mound, in the marker database, the county histories, and the archaeological summaries read for the archaeology entry above, returned the same negative. Printed whole, then: on the published record, Mishawaka's ground holds a documented village, a documented cornfield, a symbolic marker for a fictional grave, and no documented mound and no documented burial. Anything further is not history yet; it would begin, if it ever begins, in the restricted site files and in consultation with the nations whose ground this was — and consultation, not excavation, is where this section's account of the dead properly ends.

The record's edge: what a fuller record would require

The leg closes by naming its own thinness in one place, so that no later pass has to rediscover it. The Mishawaka village is documented by name, place, nation, and one cornfield, in four retrospective accounts spread across a hundred and fifty years — 1875, 1880, 1907, and the commissioned city history — and by nothing contemporary with itself that. Its chief is unnamed, its population uncounted, its founding and its internal life unrecorded, its people's destination after about 1820 unstated, its dead unlocated in print, and its ground unexcavated in any published report. What stands in the fragment is everything the reachable record carries, at the strength it carries it: a Potawatomi village at a rapids, in a valley whose first history is the Myaamia emergence on this river and whose last treaty-century fact is a band that never left; ground taken in one article of one treaty in 1828 and never reserved; a removal that passed the town by because the town was not there yet and the village was already gone; and a name in three readings that outlasted everyone. That is the tribes record of Mishawaka, whole at its true size — the valley's long record boundary-printed behind it, the townsite's short one in front, and the line between them drawn where the documents draw it.