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FIRST IN THE RECORD, AND IN POSSESSION AT THE TAKING
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 valley record is carried at full strength in this build's South Bend leg. The people in possession of this ground through the French and American centuries were the Potawatomi, whose towns stood up the St. Joseph River and whose country the whole Kankakee valley was. Howard's pioneers chapter gives this ground's 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). Chapman's physical chapter preserves the use in motion: the Potawatomi seasonal parties that came down from Terre Coupee and the St. Joseph country through the Grapevine to the Kankakee and on to the Illinois country, hunting, fishing, and trapping the marsh as a yearly round. The marsh was not wilderness to them; it was a worked landscape — wild rice and waterfowl, muskrat and deer, fish in the sloughs — and the townsite's dry edge at its eastern head was the kind of ground a hunting party crossed, camped on, and left. That distinction — used country, not seated country — is the one the next article tests.