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Chapman's predator list is three animals deep, and each has a different end: the "black wolf" and "black bear" gone with or before the buffalo by 1880, and — a distinction his own text forces — the panther gone in the same sentence while the "catamount" is merely "very rare." The two cat names are the period's loose usage for the cougar and the smaller wildcats, and this article does not merge them: what Chapman proves is that a large cat was already gone from the county by 1880 and a smaller cat was already rare.
The state mammal record, at the Mumford-and-Whitaker class the audit names (John O. Whitaker Jr. and Russell E. Mumford, Mammals of Indiana), sizes the ends at state frame. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' own species accounts, which rest on that record, state the cougar's end plainly: mountain lions — "sometimes called cougar, puma, catamount, and panther" — "were extirpated from Indiana by the late 1800s," Indiana has no breeding population, and the only confirmed modern reports in the state are two, in Clay County in fall 2009 and Greene County in spring 2010, both in the southern hills, neither in this county. The wolf's state end is conventionally dated to the same era of bounty and clearing — wolves eliminated from Indiana by the early 1900s at the latest tellings (one secondary summary gives 1908) — with no reintroduction program and no breeding population since; no wolf record for St. Joseph County or Lincoln Township was found in any source reached, and none is claimed. For both animals, the honest county sentence is Chapman's: present at settlement, gone or nearly gone by 1880, and absent from the verified record ever since.
The bear breaks the pattern, and the break is dated and sited in this county. The DNR's black bear account states that before 2015 "the last confirmed report of a black bear in Indiana was in 1871" — one telling of the June 2015 release, citing Whitaker and Mumford, gives the last confirmed report of a resident wild bear as 1850, and both tellings print here unmerged, as the conflict they are. On 12 June 2015 DNR biologists confirmed a wild black bear northwest of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, walked in from Michigan — identified from scat examined by biologist Budd Veverka — "the first verified presence of a bear in the state in more than 140 years." The young male stayed some five months, was last reported in Indiana on 13 October 2015, moved west toward Michigan City, escaped a relocation trap, and overwintered back in Michigan on the peer-reviewed account (Westrich, Human–Wildlife Interactions, 2018); further confirmed Indiana bears followed in 2016, 2018 and 2021, all outside this county. Indiana still has no breeding bear population, and no bear record in Lincoln Township was found. The arc nonetheless belongs in this section whole: the predator Chapman listed as gone in 1880 walked back into this county, on a dated day, in June 2015 — a visitor, not a restoration, and printed at exactly that size.
Sources: Chapman (1880), p. 340; Indiana DNR, black bear and mountain lion species accounts (read November 2026); Indiana DNR releases of 12 and 15 June and 17 July 2015; Westrich (2018), black bears recolonizing Indiana. Closure: DUG at county/state frame — wolf and panther township last-records are a NAMED GAP inside a dug article, settler: Mumford & Whitaker's county-by-county specimen record and the county histories' bounty records, neither of which was reached at specimen strength.