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1858–1918 · THE COUNTY HISTORIES' CRIME RECORD, SWEPT
The checklist for this section orders the early record read case by case — the first murder trials, the saloon-era killings — and the honest product of that order, for Osceola and Penn Township, is a negative with its searches shown. The county's preserved early crime record lives in the county histories, above all in Charles C. Chapman's 1880 history and its "Dark Deeds" tradition of narrated killings. Swept for this build, that record seats the county's first murder indictment in 1858 — the Eager and Kelley case — on Mishawaka ground, and its other preserved killings in Greene Township, in South Bend, and at New Carlisle. No case in it is seated in Penn Township or at Osceola. Howard's 1907 history, whose Osceola section the first-law article cites, carries the village's civic record without a crime entry. The saloon era that gives the checklist item its name — the decades when the river and road towns of this county drank in licensed saloons and occasionally killed in them — leaves no Osceola killing in the record reached: no tavern shooting, no river-boat or railroad affray with a body in it, stands against the township in the histories, the appellate reports, or the press record consulted.
The same test, run for the nineteenth-century bank page the checklist orders printed blank where it is blank, prints blank here on better than silence: the digitized press of the century does carry a famous Osceola bank robbery — February 1885, the bank of Morgan Seely blown with giant powder, the thieves captured the same day — and it is Osceola, Pennsylvania, in Tioga County, excluded on its face and printed here only so the test stands visible. No bank stood in Osceola, Indiana, in the record reached to be robbed, and no robbery of one appears. The deep township chapters of both county histories, read first-hand for the township by name, stand in the closing article as the named settler that can raise this negative's strength; at the strength reached, the early record of Osceola ground is what the next two centuries repeat: the county's violent history happened somewhere else.
Sources: C. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), crime record as swept for this build (first murder indictment 1858, Mishawaka ground; preserved killings in Greene Township, South Bend, New Carlisle); Howard (1907), Osceola section; the 1885 bank-robbery item as printed in the Wellsboro Agitator, February 17, 1885 (Osceola, Pennsylvania — trap excluded).