The traffic, at evidence strength

1847 – c. 1856

First, the negative at the center of it: Wilbur H. Siebert, the Underground Railroad's first national historian, found no conclusive evidence that a direct route came through South Bend — a finding carried in Janette Thomas Windle's 1939 account of this county's tradition and never overturned by a stronger record. The lines that demonstrably ran, ran elsewhere, and are printed as elsewhere: the Goshen–Bristol line in Elkhart County, ending at C. L. Murray's home four miles from the Michigan line, the last station in Indiana, with the Cathcart house at Bristol; the La Porte County line through Westville, organized from Illinois, with Jonathan Williams's home among its stations. The Illinois organizer who built that line passed South Bend by on purpose — its abolitionists, he judged, were "too cautious" — and placed his station instead at Bertrand, Michigan, in the hands of Mr. King, a shoemaker, and Mr. Adlery, a harnessmaker. The Michigan Road ran through this county as it ran through the state, and the road's geography is this history's to state in its roads record; but no carrier reached ties freedom traffic to the Michigan Road in this county, and none is invented here.

The documented passages are few, named, and mostly southward or anecdotal: the one passage proved in court records is the Powell family's transit of September–October 1849 — and it ran southward, in custody, ending in the family's freedom at the South Bend courthouse; it is boundary-printed with the case in this addendum's final article. The northward passages rest on reminiscence, printed at reminiscence strength. Thomas H. Bulla's memory, carried by Windle, tells of a wagon in Clay Township about 1856 fitted with an inverted second box, two Black men hidden between the boxes, the Bulla family filling the wagon with food and driving north. Solomon Palmer's own telling has him picking up three Black travelers near his mill ten miles south of South Bend, feeding them behind locked doors, and driving them that night to Niles, where La Pierre put them on the train for Detroit and Canada. Webster's anecdote runs through the barber Sawyer: money given, a fugitive hidden in a haymow while his master slept at the St. Joe House, then driven to Niles and put on a train that night. Beyond these, the county record reached gives nothing: no second seizure, rendition or habeas case touching this county in the 1840s or 1850s stands in Chapman, Howard, Thornbrough or the case literature.

The reservoir the traffic ran toward was real, and it is Michigan's: across the state line, the Black settlement of Cass County, Michigan, held — on the estimate of an 1851 pamphlet — some 1,200 to 1,500 Black people, many of them fugitives, with Wright Maudlin at its center; the Kentucky Raid of August 1847, when slavecatchers swept that settlement, is the event that frames the Powell seizure two years later. The neighboring county's court case stands at boundary size: Thomas Harris, who escaped Kentucky in September 1846 and worked at Bristol for S. P. Judson at ten dollars a month, was seized in 1847, freed by a justice of the peace, and his captors were convicted of riot in 1848 — a conviction reversed under Prigg v. Pennsylvania; the St. Joseph Valley Register covered the affair on 27 August 1847, and the state marks it today with marker 20.2007.1 in Elkhart County. For Mishawaka ground specifically, the article prints exactly what the record gives: no passage of a freedom-seeker through Mishawaka appears in any source reached — not in the county histories, not in the reminiscence literature, not in the case record. The searches are named in the next article, where the station claims are tested by the same standard.

Sources

1. Janette Thomas Windle (1939), carrying Wilbur H. Siebert's finding — no conclusive evidence of a direct route through South Bend; the Bulla wagon anecdote, c. 1856, Clay Township, from Thomas H. Bulla's memory.
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County (1880) — the Palmer and Webster anecdotes in the tellers' own frames; the Bertrand placement and the "too cautious" judgment, via the tradition Chapman prints.
3. Elkhart County record — the Goshen–Bristol line (Murray, Cathcart); the Harris case, Graves et al. v. State, 1 Ind. 368 (1849); St. Joseph Valley Register, 27 August 1847; Indiana Historical Bureau marker 20.2007.1.
4. La Porte County record — the Westville line and Jonathan Williams, organized from Illinois.
5. The 1851 pamphlet estimate of the Cass County, Michigan, settlement (1,200–1,500), and the Kentucky Raid of August 1847 — Michigan frame, boundary-printed.
6. Notre Dame Magazine — the Bulla farm tradition and its inspection (see the station-claims article).