The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The bison has two records here, and they do not meet: a county record that is firm, and a township record that does not exist. The county record is Chapman's, twice over. In the natural-history chapter the buffalo heads the gone list — it "grazed upon the verdant prairies" of this county and "has been driven westward" before 1880. In the preceding narrative chapter, quoting a South Bend Tribune writer of 1878 on the Potawatomi portage route, the buffalo stands among the animals that "all belonged to them for their sustenance and support" on the St. Joseph–Kankakee crossing — buffalo on the river corridor, in a settler-era telling, at county strength. North of the county line the place-name record agrees: the historical marker for Parc aux Vaches, near Bertrand in Berrien County, Michigan, records that the French named that ground — "cow pasture" — "for the wild buffalo that once grazed here," where the Sauk and Miami trails crossed. Buffalo on this river system, in the portage country north and east of Walkerton, is documented.
The township test is the Parkovash test. The Parkovash was the Potawatomi camp and fishing ground on Portage Prairie, treated in Timothy Edward Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907) in its own chapter ("The Parkovash, Indian Camps and Trails") — Portage Prairie and the portage, in the county's northern tier, not in Lincoln Township. No ox-head, buffalo skull, bone bed or hunt record sited in Lincoln Township was found in Chapman, in Howard, or in any source reached for this section; the banked set's only early-fauna line for the town's own ground is the town history's general "deer herds, wolves and catamounts" opening, which names no bison. The verdict therefore prints at its true size: bison ranged the St. Joseph River and portage prairies of this county — proven; bison on the ground of Lincoln Township itself — not proven on any record reached, and not claimed. A prairie-edge township on the Kankakee marsh was within the animal's county range, and that sentence is inference, printed as inference, not as a township record.
Sources: Chapman (1880), pp. 335–336 and 340; Howard (1907), contents and Parkovash chapter frame; Michigan historical marker, Parc aux Vaches (L1363C), Historical Marker Database transcription. Closure: MIXED — county presence DUG; the Lincoln Township verdict is a stated negative, settler: any Lincoln Township bone, hunt or survey record in the Walkerton Area Historical Society's collections or the General Land Office survey notes for Township 35–36 North, Range 1–2 West/East as they touch Lincoln Township.