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NO VILLAGE HERE TO END — WHAT ENDED WAS THE USE
This ground had no village, and so it has no abandonment story; what ended here was a use, and the ending is dated by the valley's record, not by any event in this township: between the Twin Lakes deadline of August 1838 and the last Indiana columns of 1843, the people whose hunting and travelling ground this was were removed, fled, or gathered into the excepted band across the state line. The surveyors had already cut the ground into sections and the land office had already sold the county's first entries north of it while the title's human fact was still Potawatomi. No source reached names the last band, the last family or the last season on this ground, and the count of the removed from this township stands as a named gap with the removal muster rolls as its settling source. The checklist's smallpox test applies to the valley's one abandonment story, and it is printed here at boundary size with its limits, because the ground is Mishawaka's and the telling is that build's: De Kever's account of the rapids village — the one Potawatomi village the record names in this county's Indiana ground — dates its end to about 1820 and gives the cause as smallpox. The limits are these: the account is a single modern source, the city's commissioned history of 1975; no contemporary document reached in any pass of this build confirms a smallpox abandonment at the rapids, fixes its date, or names the village's people; and the village itself appears in no standard village list. The story may be true — smallpox ran through the valley's nations repeatedly in the era, and a town at a fishing rapids was exposed to every traveller the river carried — but "may be true" is where the record leaves it. For this ground there is not even that much, and this section does not pretend otherwise.