The valley's first peoples, in brief

BEFORE THE TOWN

The bend was inhabited long before it was named: The St. Joseph Valley was Native country for as far back as its record runs. Among the earliest peoples known in what became northern Indiana were the Miami, whose country covered the upper Wabash and reached into this valley; by the years around 1700 the Potawatomi had moved into the region in force, drawn by the same river trade and rich hunting and planting ground that would draw everyone after them, and the valley of the bend became Potawatomi country — a landscape of villages, cornfields, sugar camps and trails, governed from within Native nations and tied by kinship and trade to the whole Great Lakes world. The portage trail at the bend was theirs. So was the knowledge of it that they sold, lent and finally had taken from them.

The end came by paper before it came by soldiers. The cessions that shrank the Potawatomi homeland ran through a generation of treaties — St. Mary's in 1818, the Mississinewa in 1826, Tippecanoe in 1832, and finally Chicago in 1833 — each one reducing a nation that had covered the southern lake country to reservations, allotments, and in the end a deadline to leave. The full record of the valley's peoples — the villages at the bend, the treaty councils, the chiefs and the missions — belongs to the Before the City section of this record, and the removals that ended their tenure are told below in the Story of South Bend section's own sequence, because the town's founding cannot be understood without them. What belongs here is only the frame: when the first French keelboats and canoes came up the river in the 1670s, and when the first American traders built their cabins a century and a half later, they were not entering an empty place. They were entering somebody's country, at a crossing that country had used for generations.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend reference history — the Miami as among the valley's earliest known peoples, the Potawatomi succeeding them in the region, and the portage route used for centuries by Native travellers.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, "Historical Indians of Indiana" and the St. Joseph County marker series — the Potawatomi tenure of the St. Joseph Valley to the removals of the 1830s and 1840s.
3. Text of U.S. Senate Resolution 499 (116th Congress) — the treaty sequence that reduced the Potawatomi homeland: St. Mary's (1818), Mississinewa (1826), Tippecanoe (1832) and the reservations that followed.
4. before-the-city section, this record — the villages, treaties and peoples of the valley in full.