The Parkovash: Buffalo Ground Below This City

The French era to 1880; Howard's account, 1907

Mishawaka's river bottoms are named buffalo ground in the county's own history — not by a sighting, but by a habit the French hunters recorded in a place-name. Howard's county history (1907) gives the river bottoms their French name and explains it from the animals: "Here came the elk and the deer; but, more than all, this was the favorite haunt of the buffalo, the great wild oxen and cows that came into the cool shadows from the hot sun of the prairies, to browse on the fresh grass and drink of the sweet waters. From the mouth of the river, on either side, and far up beyond the limits of St. Joseph county, extended this magnificent park-like buffalo range." The French called it Parc aux Vaches — park of the cows — worn down in settler spelling to "parkovash," and Howard bounds its application in the sentence that puts this city inside it: the name is "usually, no doubt properly, confined in application to the plain along the eastern bank of the river above and below the cities of South Bend and Mishawaka." The bottoms below Mishawaka's dams, in other words, are the eastern-bank plain the name describes. A place-name is evidence of a particular kind: buffalo cows and calves coming to the same shaded bottoms season after season, familiar enough to the men who worked the river that the ground took its name from them. Chapman, writing a generation earlier from the settlement generation's own memory, states the presence in the county's fauna list without qualification — "the buffalo which grazed upon the verdant prairies has been driven westward" — and the two books, compiled from different materials, agree. The bison's presence on this ground therefore stands as documented; its leaving is undated, there being no dated last-bison record for this county in any source reached, and none is borrowed from another county to fill the space. The elk stands with it: Chapman lists the elk among the departed, Howard names it with the deer as a Parkovash animal, and no elk-specific episode on this ground was found.

Principal sources

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (Chicago & New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1907), Chapter II, §V, "The Parkovash, Indian Camps and Trails," pp. 44–47 — read from the book's digitized text.
2. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, p. 340 — the buffalo and elk in the county's departed list.