The valley people's upcountry, and the one named chief

THIS GROUND'S SHARE OF THE POTAWATOMI VALLEY

What the record gives this township of the valley's people is use, passage and one grave: the river frontage and the Baugo bottoms were the hunting and fishing upcountry of the river towns — the ground between Parc aux Vaches and the portage, travelled by the river and the trails the Story of Osceola section's road articles inherit. The county histories' Penn chapters, written within living memory of the removal, preserve the township's single named-chief record, and it is a burial. Chapman tells it in the township chapter (p. 789): "The noted chief 'Raccoon' was buried near the house of Mr. James Curtis, in the eastern part of the township, and for weeks his tribe would bring their provisions to his grave, and sing and dance around the grave for some time, and then eat their dinners and return to camp. Raccoon's skeleton was exhumed a short time since by the Curtis boys, who took the jaw bone to Mishawaka, where it can now be found in the Enterprise office." The Curtis biographical sketch repeats it (p. 805), the farm placed in section 21 by the son Edwin's sketch: Raccoon "was buried on the farm of Mr. Curtis, near his house. A son of Mr. Curtis, knowing the exact locality, many years afterward exhumed the skeleton and procured the jawbone of that noted chief." The record is printed at Chapman's strength and whole, including its ugly close: a chief's grave tended for weeks by his people's mourning visits, then dug up by the settler family's sons and its relic carried to a newspaper office in Mishawaka. It is a single chief's grave on a farm — a burial record for Penn ground at print strength — not a mound or an earthwork, and Chapman attaches no antiquity claim to it beyond the chief's own lifetime. No other named Native person is attached to this township's ground in anything reached for this build; the valley's chiefs of the treaty era — the names the county's narrative history is built from — belong to the river towns and the portage, and this section does not move them east to fill the silence.