The River's First Names: Sheggwe and the Man Who Appeared Like a Mushroom

Names in use before 1689 · printed in Notre Dame Magazine

The tale: Before the river was the Saint Joseph, it was Sheggwe — “SHAG-wah” — in the telling Notre Dame Magazine prints from its three authorities: the Potawatomi name for the river whose southern bend gives South Bend its name, a word the magazine glosses “happened spontaneously,” and behind the word a legend: the name comes, the magazine says, from a man who would mysteriously materialize on the river's banks like a mushroom — there, and then there, the way mushrooms are, without a road by which he came. The magazine prints the name and the legend together, and names its sources for both: Gregory Dowd, a historian of Native America; John Palmer of the St. Joseph County Public Library's local history and genealogy room; and the Northern Indiana Center for History. That is the whole of the printed record this section could reach for the mushroom man: a name, a meaning, a story one sentence long, and three named keepers. He has no other biography, and this record gives him none.

The second name: the same column carries the river's other Indian name, “a second Indian name, possibly used by the Miami,” Sagwasibi — “coming-out river,” for the river's work as the connector from the Kankakee to Lake Michigan. The coming-out is the oldest story this ground has. In the Myaamia emergence telling — the people's first story, as the Myaamia tell it in their own publications — the people come out of the water at Saakiiweeyonki, the place of emergence, on this river system near the present South Bend ground, and take from their downstream way of life the meaning of their name, the Downstream People. The emergence story has the strongest papers of any tale in this section: it was told by Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) to the linguist J. P. Dunn in the early 1900s and stands in print in Myaamia and Peoria Narratives and Winter Stories (2010), and Charles Christopher Trowbridge had recorded Miami traditions, the emergence among them, in the 1820s. The full telling belongs to this history's account of the peoples before the city; it is printed here at the size of its documents — a recorded telling, a named teller, a named recorder — because a folklore record for this river that began with the settlers would be missing its first chapter twice over.

The record beside the tale: La Salle, the first European on the river in the written record, called it the Miami River in 1679 for the people he found on its banks; the French name that stuck, Saint Joseph, appears first in a land grant of 1689, signed by the governor general of Canada, deeding ground near present-day Niles for the Jesuit mission of Saint Joseph. The names in order, then: Sheggwe in the Potawatomi telling, Sagwasibi in the Miami, Miami River on La Salle's maps, Saint Joseph on the French grant — and the legend of the man who appeared like a mushroom riding on the first of them, in the custody of the library and the history center that the magazine names.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine, “Wondering Out Loud: Saint Joseph River” (magazine.nd.edu) — Sheggwe, its pronunciation and gloss “happened spontaneously,” the legend of the man materializing like a mushroom, Sagwasibi as “coming-out river,” La Salle's Miami River of 1679, and the 1689 grant as the first Saint Joseph reference; the magazine's named sources: Gregory Dowd; John Palmer, St. Joseph County Public Library; the Northern Indiana Center for History.
2. David J. Costa (ed.), myaamia neehi peewaalia aacimoona neehi aalhsoohkana — Myaamia and Peoria Narratives and Winter Stories (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma, 2010) — the emergence telling of Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy), recorded by J. P. Dunn; Charles Christopher Trowbridge, Meearmeear Traditions (1820s) — Miami traditions recorded a century earlier; both as carried in this history's Fort Wayne record and the Myaamia Center's own publications.
3. This history, Before the City section — the peoples, the portage and the river's documented course, to which the emergence telling belongs in full.