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FOLK-2 DUG · THE PUBLISHED RECORD OF THE POKAGON BAND'S AUTHOR
The checklist asks which legend-books the town's first people published, and the answer is a bibliography with a name on it: Simon Pokagon (c. 1830 – January 28, 1899), son of Leopold Pokagon, chief and author of the Potawatomi. The books: The Red Man's Rebuke (1893, printed by C. H. Engle of Hartford, Michigan — on birch bark, the famous material form of Pokagon's protest literature); The Red Man's Greeting (1893, the alternate title and form of the same work); Indian Superstitions and Legends (1898); O-gi-maw-kwe Mit-i-gwa-ki, Queen of the Woods (1899, published after his death — the novel of his wife Lonidaw); Algonquin Legends of South Haven (1900); Algonquin Legends of Paw Paw Lake (1900–01); and The Pottawattomie Book of Genesis: Legend of the Creation of Man (1901). He carried the work onto the national stage as a featured speaker at the World's Columbian Exposition on October 9, 1893, and the press named him the "Red Man's Longfellow." The survival story closes the entry: the four birch-bark booklets were repatriated to the Pokagon Band's own tribal archives in 2016, in the keeping of the band's archivist, Topash-Caldwell, who received them. The boundary prints with the books: Pokagon's seats were Bertrand and Hartford, in Michigan; no book was written or printed in Walkerton. They stand in this town's folklore leg because the Pokagon homeland is the ground this township was taken from — the Treaty of Tippecanoe cession the Story of Walkerton section record settles — and because the checklist asks the first people's literature of the place itself. The books are the band's, the ground was the band's, and the printing here is at the size of that claim and no larger.
Principal sources: the published bibliographic record of Simon Pokagon (the Engle printings and the posthumous volumes); the Pokagon Band's archival record (the 2016 repatriation of the birch-bark booklets).