The Departed Predators, at Township Size

Chapman's list, 1880; the searches of November 2026

Of the black wolf, the black bear, and the panther, Mishawaka's own record is a list and a silence. Chapman's 1880 chapter places all three among the animals that went "with or before" the buffalo, and his rare-and-going list adds the catamount and the lynx — the panther and the catamount being one animal, the cougar, under its two period names, a compiler's artifact of 1880 taxonomy preserved here as printed. The state's verdict closes the wolf's question at state size: in the Indiana DNR's words, "early European settlers eliminated wolves from the state by 1908," and the one wolf confirmed in Indiana in the modern era — a young male killed in east-central Indiana in 2003, identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a disperser from a Wisconsin pack — was a wanderer from a recovered population hundreds of miles north, not a remnant of this ground's. The bear's story has a second chapter, and it is told below at its own size: the county's first confirmed bear since the nineteenth century walked its western townships in 2015. For the cougar, the record reached carries no confirmed county return at all, and the file prints that plainly against the sightings that circulate without a confirming authority.

Principal sources

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, p. 340.
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, "Gray Wolf" species account, in.gov — eliminated from Indiana by 1908; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service news account, October 2003 — the east-central Indiana wolf.
3. Joseph County bounty, wolf-hunt, or last-animal record found.