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1858–1918 · THE COUNTY HISTORIES' CRIME RECORD, SWEPT
The checklist for this section orders the early record read case by case — the first murder trials, the saloon-era killings — and the honest product of that order, for Walkerton and Lincoln Township, is a negative with its searches shown. The county's preserved early crime record lives in the county histories, above all in the "Dark Deeds" chapter of Charles C. Chapman's 1880 history, which narrates the county's killings one by one. Read whole for this build, the chapter seats its cases everywhere but here: Charles Eager, indicted October 7, 1858, for the murder of Charles Kelley at Mishawaka — the county's first murder indictment, ending in acquittal on self-defense; Alexander Wilson's 1860 killing of Samuel Pierson in Greene Township; Thomas Boucher's 1865 manslaughter in South Bend's fourth ward; Orange G. Stage's saloon killing of Charles Tibbetts in South Bend, indicted 1870, acquitted; a hunting-party killing in 1873 whose seat the narrative does not fix in Lincoln Township; and the 1874 double murder of Thomas Cihanski and his wife in their cabin three miles north of New Carlisle. No case in the chapter is seated in Lincoln Township or at Walkerton. Chapman's own Lincoln Township chapter, read first-hand for this build, carries the township's officers, churches, schools and businesses without a crime entry — and its census of the town's business in 1880 names two saloons among the four dry-goods stores and two hotels, which is the whole of the saloon era's trace on this ground in the record reached: the town drank in licensed saloons, as every railroad town did, and no killing in one stands against it.
Howard's 1907 history, the county's other standard, is the named settler that can raise this negative's strength: his Walkerton section stands in the closing article as an item for a first-hand read at full strength, the digitized volume reached for this build being imperfect. At the strength reached — Chapman's chapter and township treatment read whole, the appellate reports swept, the press record consulted — the early record of Walkerton ground is what its later centuries mostly repeat: the county's violent history happened somewhere else, and the cases that did come, when they came, came all at once in the 1970s and 1980s and arrived carrying the town's name into the state's highest court.
Sources: C. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), "Dark Deeds" chapter (the Eager, Wilson, Boucher, Stage, and Cihanski cases, at their stated seats) and Lincoln Township chapter (the 1880 business census: two saloons, no crime entry), both read first-hand for this build; T. E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), Walkerton section named as settler in the closing article.