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Before the City · the ground before the place
Before Osceola was a name it was a meeting of waters: a creek coming down out of the Penn Township farmland to join a river, on the river's south bank, in the northwest corner of the township. The river is the St. Joseph of Lake Michigan, running west past the ground toward the rapids at Mishawaka and the bend at South Bend; the creek is the Baugo, and the town that came in 1837 stands where the two join. Everything on this ground before the town is the story of that junction — the valley the ice left, the peoples who held it, the French who passed it on the river road, the treaties that took it, and the settlers who reached it, by the record's own account, before the last of those treaties was signed. this section carries that ground's record at the size the record gives it, and hands off to the Story of Osceola section at the plat.
The frame: the south bank at the creek's mouth
THE GEOGRAPHIC PREMISE
The ground is a junction before it is anything else: the federal geographic-names record (GNIS feature 2396838) fixes the town that came later at 41.66472 degrees north, 86.07889 degrees west, at 735 feet of elevation — low…
The rock beneath: a floor no one has seen
THE BEDROCK, AT TRUE SIZE
No outcrop shows on this ground: the bedrock under Penn Township lies under the full thickness of the glacial drift, as it does across the county, and no quarry, cut or well record reached for this section names it at the townsite. The county treatment — the Devonian and Mississippian floor the drift conceals, read from the state survey's county work — is carried at full strength in the South Bend and Granger legs of this build and is pointed to, not retold. This ground's own statement is the negative, printed at its size: the rock here is a floor known only by inference from the county around it, and the settling record for anything finer is the state geological survey's subsurface files.
The drift and the lobes
THE CARRIED GROUND
The ground itself is carried ground: the ice that crossed this county came in lobes — the Michigan lobe down the lake basin, the Saginaw lobe from the northeast, the Huron-Erie lobe from the east — and their meeting over the St.…
The river's making, and the creek
THE CHANNEL AND ITS TRIBUTARY
The present river is a captured river: the St. Joseph runs in a channel cut by glacial meltwater — the great Kankakee torrent that drained the ice margins westward — and the river's making, its capture and reversal out of that…
The fossil record: a county negative, at true size
WHAT THE GROUND HAS YIELDED
Nothing from this ground is in the fossil record reached: no named fossil locality, no collected specimen, no survey entry ties a fossil yield to the townsite or to Penn Township's river reach in any source this section could reach — the same county negative the Granger leg printed for its upland, and printed here at the same size rather than inflated with the state's general record. What a fuller record would require is stated plainly: the state geological survey's locality files and the university collections' accession records, neither of which is open to this build at item level. The drift itself is the ground's only archive, and it has not been read for this township at specimen strength. The negative stands as the finding.
The peoples of the valley, in sequence
FIRST IN THE RECORD, AND IN POSSESSION AT CONTACT
Two different facts, stated as two: the first people the written record names in this valley are the Miami — the Myaamia — whose own account of emergence at Saakiiweeyonki, "the Confluence," on the St. Joseph River is carried at…
The first passage, and the French century upriver
DECEMBER 1679, AND THE CENTURY THAT FOLLOWED
The first European passage of this valley is dated to the month: in December 1679 La Salle's party — thirty-three persons in eight canoes, Tonty and Hennepin among them, with three Récollet friars — ascended the St. Joseph from…
The traders before the post
THE VALLEY LINE, AND THE TEST THIS GROUND RETURNS
The test first: the valley's posts stood where its geography put them — at the river's mouth, at Bertrand below the chiefs' towns, and at the carrying place. For the Mishawaka townsite that test was run in its build and returned…
The taking, instrument by instrument
EVERY CESSION TOUCHING THIS GROUND, IN ORDER
The series opens with the instrument that did not take it: at Chicago on 29 August 1821 the Potawatomi ceded some five million acres of Michigan country — and Indiana's St. Joseph valley stood untouched in Potawatomi title when…
The exception that held: Pokagon's band
THE BAND THAT STAYED, AND ITS MECHANISM
One band negotiated the right to remain: Leopold Pokagon (about 1775–1841), who succeeded Topenebee as the valley's principal chief on Topenebee's death in 1826, led the Catholic Potawatomi whose affiliation the record dates to…
The removal of the rest
1838 AND 1840–43, DATED BY COLUMN
The great column did not pass this ground, and is printed as not-here: the Twin Lakes reserve, sold under the Yellow River treaty of 5 August 1836 — a signature Menominee protested on 4 November 1837 had been forged for him …
The survey
LINES RUN BEFORE AND AFTER THE CESSION
This ground's north fence was run before its title moved: the line due east from Lake Michigan's southern extreme — the state line — was surveyed in 1827, the year before the Carey Mission treaty made it a boundary call. Howard…
1828–1832: the first settlement, and the memoir question
THE MEMOIR RECORD OF PENN TOWNSHIP
The first settlers reached this ground by the river, and the two county histories date them a year earlier than the town's own page does: Chapman states it twice — "William and Timothy Moat settled in what is now known as Penn…
The roads surveyed through, 1832–33
THE GROUND'S FIRST INFRASTRUCTURE
Before the town was platted, the state surveyed two roads through its ground: in February 1832 the Indiana legislature appointed Nathan Coleman of Allen County, James Blair of Elkhart County and Samuel Martin of St. Joseph County…
The Civil Frame: County and Township
1832, IN TWO PRINTINGS, AND THE HAND-OFF
The government arrived while the ground was still being taken — and the two county histories date its arrival differently: Howard gives the full sequence: a first division on 25 November 1830 by the board of justices, under which…
The drift and the lobes: the carried ground at its thickness, and the three lobes that met here
INDIANA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY COUNTY WORK, AS BANKED IN THE-LAND.HTML · FRAME NOT RE-LITIGATED
The frame, restated once so the detail has somewhere to stand. Henry H. Gray's Physiographic Divisions of Indiana (Indiana Geological Survey Special Report 61, 2000) divides this township's two-part ground between two of his…