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17 SEPTEMBER 1721 · THE COUNTY'S DEEP-TIME FOOTPRINT
The naming: The earliest dated animal record in this county's history is a name on a map. Charlevoix, camped on the portage on 17 September 1721, named Ox-Head Prairie for "the head of an ox of monstrous size" found there. Howard's history, printing the naming, adds the footnote that judges the find: it was "more likely… a mastadon or of a mammoth, many of the remains of both being found at different places in the county, particularly in the miry stretches of the Kankakee bottoms." No specimen, site or measurement beyond that sentence is claimed anywhere in the record — a French traveller's place-name, an Edwardian historian's footnote, and the county's Pleistocene dead underneath both. The prairie's name is the fossil the record actually holds.
Sources:
- The Local Animals section of this history — Charlevoix's naming of Ox-Head Prairie, 17 September 1721, and Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), footnote judging the head a mastodon's or mammoth's, with the Kankakee bottoms remains.