The Bison Question, Tested on This Ground

Terre Coupee prairie, Olive Township — against the South Bend telling

Lead: Verdict: bison belong to this county's printed past, but no record found in this section places bison specifically on Terre Coupee prairie, and no ox-head-form place-name attaches to this ground. The stronger tellings belong to other ground, and this article keeps them there.

What Chapman (1880) actually prints is county-wide and past-tense. The quadruped chapter: “The buffalo which grazed upon the verdant prairies has been driven westward.” The 1878 South Bend Tribune reminiscence Chapman reprints (pp. 335–336) describes Potawatomi travel through this county — the portage across Portage Prairie, a stop at Terre Coupee, “signifying ‘land cut off’,” where the water formed “a large, shallow lake,” then out Grapevine Creek to the Kankakee — and closes, “The buffalo, the deer and the antelope, as well as the wild fowls and fish, all belonged to them for their sustenance and support.” That sentence names the animals of the whole hunting country the party crossed; it does not place a buffalo herd on Terre Coupee itself, and Chapman's own place account of Terre Coupee is about water, fishing, trapping and hunting in general. The prairie list in the same chapter names Terre Coupee first and Portage Prairie separately, in German Township — the two prairies are distinct entries, and nothing in Chapman transfers Portage Prairie's record west into Olive Township.

The state record, printed at state strength, is consistent with an early, thin presence and an early end: Indiana DNR's published bison note states bison were “never in great numbers” in Indiana, moving between Kentucky salt licks and Illinois plains along a southern trace, and that “several published sources indicate wild bison were gone from Indiana by 1830”; The Nature Conservancy's Kankakee Sands record, reported by Indiana University, gives the last known wild bison in Indiana shot in Orange County in 1830, with a lone bison near the Kankakee in Newton County shot in 1824 — Kankakee-valley ground, but Newton County's, far downriver of this township. The French name Parc aux Vaches — “cow pasture,” named, its Michigan historical marker states, “for the wild buffalo that once grazed here” — belongs to the Bertrand/Niles Township ground on the St. Joseph River in Michigan, north of the county, not to Terre Coupee. Searches run for this row: Chapman and Howard (1907) prairie and place-name record for Terre Coupee, Portage Prairie and buffalo; the Parkovash/Portage telling as carried in the South Bend build; ox-head / buffalo-head place-names in St. Joseph County and Olive Township. Result: no ox-head-form place-name for this ground was found in any of them, and the Parkovash telling itself is Portage Prairie material — South Bend's ground, by the task's boundary and by Chapman's own township attributions. Finding, printed as a finding: on this ground the bison is a county-level Chapman sentence and a state-level 1830 ending — nothing tighter is in the record reached.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), pp. 335–337 (1878 Tribune reminiscence; prairie list) and p. 340 (quadrupeds).
2. Indiana DNR, “It's official: Ouabache SP bison are America's mammal” (events.in.gov, 2016) — state-level bison history, gone by 1830.
3. Indiana University News (2025), Kankakee Sands bison — last wild bison in Indiana, Orange County, 1830; herd reintroduced at Kankakee Sands, Newton County, 2016.
4. Michigan historical marker, Parc aux Vaches, Madeline Bertrand Park, Berrien County (HMdb) — buffalo naming on Bertrand ground.
5. Howard, Timothy E., A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), contents and topography chapters — Parkovash and Portage Prairie treated as South Bend ground.