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The nations of this ground before the treaties
The Myaamia account: The first history of this ground is the Myaamia people's own, and it begins on this river. In the emergence account the Myaamia Center of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma publishes — the version told by Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) to J. P. Dunn in the early 1900s — the people come out of the water at Saakiiweeyonki, "the Confluence," on Saakiiweesiipiwi, the St. Joseph River, and built their first village there; from that beginning they went downstream and built their towns at the confluences and portages of the Wabash country, to Kiihkayonki at the head of the Maumee and beyond. The tribe's publications place the emergence on the St. Joseph in terms this section carries side by side, as the tribe gives them: the Myaamia Center's community history names "the St. Joseph River near South Bend, Indiana" as the emergence river and Saakiiweeyonki as the spot, while other tribal publications describe the place as where the St. Joseph's River empties into Lake Michigan. The two wordings are not reconciled here; what is constant across them is that the Myaamia's own recorded beginning is set on this river system, in this valley's world — the record this section is bound to print before any French document, because it is the valley's first history of itself.
The Miami town at the portage: When the written record opens, in December 1679, the ground at the portage is Miami ground in fact: La Salle's party came up the river to a town of the Miamis near the carrying place — the village from which the French memoir measures "a portage of three leagues" to the Kankakee's source. It was to this valley's Miami, gathered at their St. Joseph town, that La Salle returned in May 1681 to make the alliance that bound the Miami and the Illinois country to his system. The town's exact site is not established in the sources reached — the record puts it at the portage's eastern end, on the river by the bend — rather than pinned to a modern parcel. What happened to the valley's Miami across the next century is the valley's central population fact: as the French post system settled at the river's upper end and the fur trade re-sorted the nations, the Miami center of gravity moved southeast, to Kekionga and the Wabash towns, and the St. Joseph valley filled with their Potawatomi kin and allies.
The Potawatomi valley: By the treaty century the St. Joseph valley was Bodéwadmi — Potawatomi — country, governed from its villages by chiefs the treaty record names in a line: Nanaquiba, the revered chief of the river's lower towns; his son and successor Topenebee — Topinabee in the other standard spelling — principal chief of the St. Joseph Potawatomi, whose villages stood on the river opposite present Niles and whose name runs through the treaties from the 1790s to his death in 1826; and, after him, Leopold Pokagon, who succeeded him as head of the valley's Potawatomi and whose band's story has its own entry below. The valley's village geography in the instruments is exact enough to quote: the supplementary articles of 1833 describe "the tract of land on the Saint Joseph River, opposite the town of Niles, and extending to the line of the State of Indiana, on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated" — the chiefs' towns stood on Michigan ground, at the state line, with their people, fields and kin reaching into the Indiana valley this section covers. The trails that served that world crossed the future city: the Dragoon Trace, the Indian trail from Fort Wayne to the bend's village site — its line survives in the street names East Washington and Lincoln Way East — and the crossings toward the portage and the Kankakee. The nations' full political record — the treaty strategy, the confederacies, the chiefs' biographies — belongs to the tribal record of the region as a whole; what is this section's to state is the ground truth: the city was platted on Potawatomi land, in a Potawatomi valley, within living memory of the villages at the state line.
Sources: the Myaamia Center, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — "A Myaamia Beginning," Aacimotaatiiyankwi (the tribe's community history), and the tribe's published history as carried by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and Miami University's Wiikiaami record — the emergence at Saakiiweeyonki, in both of the tribe's wordings; David J. Costa, ed., myaamia neehi peewaalia aacimoona neehi aalhsoohkana (2010) — the Godfroy telling; the Sabrevois memoir (1718) and Howard (1907) — the Miami village at the portage and La Salle's May 1681 visit; Supplementary Articles to the Treaty of Chicago, 27 September 1833, 7 Stat. 442 — the Topenebee and Pokagon villages tract; Edythe J. Brown, ed., The Story of South Bend (1920) — the Dragoon Trace line.