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1779–1820 — the trade system the city inherited
Burnett: The first trader the record follows in this valley is not at the bend but at the river's mouth, and the file prints him there. William Burnett, a New Jersey man of American sympathies, entered the St. Joseph valley sometime between 1779 and 1782 — the years vary across the accounts, and the scholarly study of his trade, Susan Sleeper-Smith's "St. Joseph Trade from Burnett to Taylor," carries the range — and built his post just below the mouth of the St. Joseph, at present St. Joseph, Michigan. In 1782 he married Kakima, a Potawatomi woman of the valley's ruling family: the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's own published genealogy makes her a daughter of the chief Nanaquiba and sister of Topenebee; Sleeper-Smith's reading of the trade records makes her Topenebee's daughter.
The file carries both, as it found them; the marriage itself, and what it meant, no account disputes — it bound the valley's biggest trader into the chief's family, and the seven Burnett children, educated at Detroit, worked in Potawatomi affairs in Indiana and Michigan all their lives. Burnett's house stood at the lake, but his system was the valley's: his account books for 1800–1802 are the documentary base for what the St. Joseph trade actually moved, and a later popular account credits him with posts at Chicago and on the Kankakee as well — the portage's far end. He disappears from the record in the War of 1812 years — Sleeper-Smith's words — with one local account dating his death to 1814; his son James kept the mouth post until 1833. No source reached places a Burnett house at the bend itself, and the file does not invent one: his relevance here is that the trade the bend's posts joined — its goods, its credit, its marriage politics, its Potawatomi counterparty — was the system Burnett had built at the river's mouth a generation before the plat.
The succession at the bend: Below Burnett's generation, the valley's most prominent trading family was the Bertrands — Joseph Bertrand and his Potawatomi wife Madeleine, whose post at Parc aux Vaches, "the cow pasture," stood just north of the state line in present Michigan — boundary-printed in one line, as the valley's trade geography requires and no more. At the bend itself, the documented record of a resident post begins in 1820: Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, an educated French-Canadian in the service of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, came up the river that year and established the first trading post at the south bend of the St. Joseph — the county record's "1820 — First Trading Post" in The Story of South Bend's list of firsts — on land that was still, in law and in fact, Potawatomi land. Navarre married into the valley as Burnett had, taking a Potawatomi wife, and his post — remembered in the station name the settlement carried, Big St. Joseph Station, to distinguish it from the Little St. Joseph post near Fort Wayne — was the fixed point around which everything after accumulated. His cabin is the oldest building of the settlement story, and it survives in the keeping of The History Museum in South Bend. What Navarre began, the next entry's man bought.
Sources: Susan Sleeper-Smith, "St. Joseph Trade from Burnett to Taylor," in the Glenn A. Black Laboratory / Ball State record — Burnett's New Jersey origin, the 1779–1782 entry range, the mouth post, the 1782 marriage as the trade records give it, the children's careers, the disappearance in the War of 1812; the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's cultural heritage publications — the Nanaquiba genealogy; the Burnett's Traders chapter record, Michigan Questers, and the St. Joseph marker text — the 1814 death as the local account dates it, and the post's site; Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men (2001) — the Bertrand family at Parc aux Vaches; National Register nomination, Historic Resources of Downtown South Bend, and the East Bank historic context — Navarre's 1820 post for the American Fur Company, on land still Native-owned; Brown, The Story of South Bend (1920) — the "firsts" list.