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1679–1721 in the documents; the place-name carried into Howard's county history, 1907
The earliest dated animal record of the portage: When La Salle, lost on the portage in December 1679, finally came down the St. Joseph River to his party, the county history's account of the episode has him arriving "with the opossums hanging from his belt" — game taken on the march, and the first animal this record can date on this ground. It is a small entry and it stands at the head of the file because it is first-hand in its chain: the story comes down through the French narratives the county historians worked from, and it places the opossum — the one animal on Chapman's 1880 list that never left — in the valley at the first European passage.
The ox-head: On 17 September 1721 the traveler and missionary Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, encamped on a portage trail, wrote the letter that named Portage Prairie's neighbor: "Ox-Head Prairie, because there was found there, as they say, the head of an ox of monstrous size. Why may there not have been giants among these animals also?" Howard's county history, printing the letter in 1907, footnotes the head: "This 'ox-head' was perhaps that of an unusually large buffalo. More likely, however, it was the head of 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." The footnote is the county's documentary record of its deep-time animals: mastodon and mammoth remains found in St. Joseph County, in the Kankakee bottoms above all, stated by the county history on the authority of Bartlett and Lyon's La Salle in the St. Joseph Valley. No specimen, site, or date is given there, and none is claimed here; the entry stands at exactly that size — a named bone, a named prairie, and a county history's word that such remains were found in the county in numbers.
The Parkovash: Howard's history gives the river bottoms above and below South Bend and Mishawaka their French name and explains it from the animals: "Here came the elk and the deer; but, more than all, this was the favorite haunt of the buffalo, the great wild oxen and cows that came into the cool shadows from the hot sun of the prairies, to browse on the fresh grass and drink of the sweet waters. From the mouth of the river, on either side, and far up beyond the limits of St. Joseph county, extended this magnificent park-like buffalo range. So accustomed were the early French hunters and traders to see the buffalo cows come with their calves for rest and refreshment to these pleasant haunts along the St. Joseph, that they gave to the place the picturesque appellation of Parc aux Vaches (literally, park of the cows)," worn down in settler spelling to "parkovash," and "usually, no doubt properly, confined in application to the plain along the eastern bank of the river above and below the cities of South Bend and Mishawaka." A place-name is evidence of a particular kind: it is not a sighting but a habit, recorded by the men who worked the river, of buffalo cows and calves coming to the same shaded bottoms season after season. The bison entry below tests the question on the whole record.
Sources:
- Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (Chicago & New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1907), Chapter II, §V, "The Parkovash, Indian Camps and Trails," pp. 44–47 — the Parc aux Vaches passage (citing Baker, The St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage, p. 6, and Bartlett & Lyon, La Salle in the Valley of the St. Joseph, p. 40); the Charlevoix letter of 17 September 1721 and its editorial footnote (citing Bartlett & Lyon, p. 37); read from the book's digitized text (ldsgenealogy.com transcription of the archive.org scan).
- Howard, Vol. 1, the La Salle narrative (Bartlett & Lyon's historical sketch) — the opossums of December 1679.