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THE TRADERS AND THE FORTS, AT THIS GROUND'S SIZE
The French record of this valley is rich, and none of it stands on these sections: the first dated European passages of the county's record run on the St. Joseph River — La Salle's ascent of December 1679 passed upriver of this ground altogether, the Kankakee being the other fork of the Illinois road — and the French century that followed governed from Fort St. Joseph and the missions at the river's bend, carried whole in the South Bend leg. For this ground the tests print as negatives, with the search shown: no fort, mission, post or licensed trader's house is placed on the townsite's sections or in the Kankakee marsh reach below the portage in either county history, in Howard's posts-and-trails record, or in the valley record carried by the sister legs; the traders dug person by person in those legs — Coquillard, the Burnetts, Chandonai and the rest — are figures of the St. Joseph's banks and the portage, and not one of their houses stood on this ground. What the French century left here is use, not settlement: the marsh hunted and trapped for the posts, its furs carried out by the river and the trails. The negative is the finding, printed at its size: before the American surveys, this ground was worked country, never seated country, in the European record as in the Native one.