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1832 · the settlement's first war scare
The township's first military act was a reconnaissance, and its second was a fort — though the two county histories put the fort in two places. In the Black Hawk War summer of 1832 the settlement on Terre Coupee Prairie heard that an Indian had killed a white man near present Chicago. Chapman's Olive chapter records that "ten men went from this settlement to examine the situation," returned the next day, and found no cause of alarm; and that "a fort was built at Plainfield," the settlement's neighbor village on the same prairie road. Howard's telling, from the Haines family reminiscence, puts the flight and the fort on this ground itself: the Haines family, fleeing Hudson Township in La Porte County toward Carey Mission, stopped at Samuel Garwood's at Terre Coupee because the people there were building a fort. Both accounts print, unmerged: Chapman wrote from the township's own old men, Howard from a family that passed through it, and the prairie in a panic may well have had both a fort going up and neighbors who remembered the fact differently. The county's set-piece narrative of the scare — Judge Thomas S. Stanfield's chapter in Chapman, with its blockhouse on Portage Prairie and its sleeping picket — is South Bend's ground and is carried at frame strength only. No shot was fired in anger on this township in 1832; the war's local product was fear, a scouting party of ten, and a fort of uncertain address.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, p. 765; war chapter, "Black Hawk War" (Stanfield), pp. 449 ff.
- Howard (1907), vol.