The Baseline This Ground Shared: Chapman's County, 1880

St. Joseph County, 1880; Penn Township's share

The first survey of this ground's animals is a chapter of a book: the second chapter of Chapman's History of St. Joseph County (1880), a natural history of the county — quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, fishes — compiled within living memory of the first settlement, when men who had seen the old abundance were still alive to be asked. It opens with a census of loss: "Of the species of native quadrupeds that once roamed the flowery prairies and wild forests of this county, but few of the smaller remain, and none of the larger. Of the latter we cannot even find a specimen preserved in taxidermy. The buffalo which grazed upon the verdant prairies has been driven westward. With or before it went the beaver, elk, badger, panther, black wolf and black bear." The going-and-rare list continues through the gray fox, the catamount, the otter, the lynx, and "the beautiful Virginia deer," by 1880 a rarity in its own county; below them it counts what remained — opossum, raccoon, mink, muskrat, weasels, skunk, woodchuck, the smaller kinds, and two bats "common." Penn Township is inside that census on the same terms as every other township: Chapman surveyed a county, not a city, and Mishawaka's woods, prairies, and river bottoms in 1880 stood under the county's statement — the larger animals gone, the smaller remaining, the deer reduced to a rarity — with no township exception recorded anywhere in the chapter. The same chapter gives the bald eagle one measured line, "once quite common, now scarce," the wild turkey "almost entirely disappeared," and the prairie chicken surviving under the most prophetic warning in the book. The full chapter — the bird lists whole, the reptiles, the marsh birds and what the ditches did — is printed at whole size in South Bend's file. What this section takes from it is the baseline itself: every later entry here, the vanishings and the returns alike, is measured against a named, dated, county-specific page that covers this ground.

Principal sources

1. History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880), Chapter II, "Natural History," pp. 340–344 — read from the book's digitized text.
2. The South Bend local-animals file in this record — Chapman's chapter printed at whole size, with the county's bird, marsh, and fish entries whole.