The peoples of the valley, in sequence

FIRST IN THE RECORD, AND IN POSSESSION AT CONTACT

Two different facts, stated as two: the first people the written record names in the St. Joseph–Kankakee country are the Miami — the Myaamia — whose account and whose valley are carried at full strength in the South Bend leg, where the question was dug. The people in possession of this ground at contact and through the French and American centuries were the Potawatomi, whose river towns stood up the St. Joseph and whose country the whole Kankakee valley was — its marsh their hunting, trapping and fishing ground of the first rank. Howard's pioneers chapter gives this ground's own share of that record in one sentence: the early posts' "hunting and trapping grounds were mainly down the valley of the Kankakee, which, for centuries… has been the sportsman's paradise" (Howard, p. 131) — the marsh's duck, muskrat and deer economy, worked from the river towns, is the use this ground saw for centuries, and the trails list of the same chapter carries the Crum's Point road running toward this country (Howard, p. 131). On the townsite's own sections the record names no village, no chief and no band: no published source reached places a named site on sections 23 or 24 or in Lincoln Township, and the state's archaeological site file is closed to this build. The latest and most human evidence of possession is a settler's: Thomas H. Wiley, arriving in 1834 or 1835, found that "all his near neighbors were Indians" (Chapman, p. 749) — the ground's Potawatomi still present, as neighbors, in the settlement's first years. The Tribes leg owns the valley's people at depth; this section's statement is narrower and complete: marsh-edge ground, held as hunting country from the river towns, still occupied when the first farms were fenced.