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1878, as carried in Chapman (1880) · THE TELLER NAMED AT HIS CARRIER'S STRENGTH
The ground's name comes down with a story attached, and the story has a teller — a writer in the South Bend Tribune in 1878, quoted whole by Chapman. The telling runs as the route ran: the Michigan parties came down the St. Joseph River in canoes to Pinhook, carried their canoes across the high prairie — Portage Prairie, named for the porterage — and some crossed "over to Terre Coupee (signifying 'land cut off'), where the land was cut off by the water for many miles around, forming a large, shallow lake. Here they would build temporary huts and wait for the rest of the party to come up, in the meantime amusing themselves by rowing across and around the lake, fishing, trapping and hunting most of the time, until they were ready to start again, when they would cross the water in their canoes to the Grapevine creek, which was the outlet to this shallow lake; then down the Grapevine to the Kankakee river." It is printed as what it is: not a survey but a telling — a newspaper writer of 1878 rendering the old route as the old people remembered it, carried into the county history two years later. No Indigenous name for the river or the ground survives in any source this build reached beyond the French the voyageurs left on it, and no legend with an Indigenous teller named stands in the record; the telling above, a settler newspaper's account of an Indigenous road, is the nearest the record comes, and it is printed at exactly that remove. The place-names in all their readings stand in the tribes file, as banked; this article carries the story.
Sources:
- Chapman (1880), History of St. Joseph County, pp. 335–336 — the 1878 South Bend Tribune writer's account, quoted whole; read at the page for this section (LDSGenealogy OCR text of Chapman, part 29).
- Native Nations, nc-place-names — the name readings, cross-referenced, not re-dug.