One clause

Before there was a county there was a village, and it had a name.

Mongoquinong stood where Lima is now, which is Howe now. The 1882 county history calls it one of the most important villages of the Potawatomi. A settler who was there put its population in the thousands before any white person had entered northern Indiana. The old chief's name was Mongoquinong too, and the man who told that to Ira Ford in 1918 added that his father and his grandfather had been born in this section.

What the name meant, nobody was sure. Every book in the county's record prints Big Squaw and moves on. One footnote, in a chapter about a different township, stops to say the meaning is uncertain, lists three possibilities, works through an etymology, and concludes it cannot be maintained on good authority.

That footnote is the only place in four volumes where any of these books admits it does not know something about the language of the people who named this place.

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The county's founding sentence on the subject is one line in its physical features chapter, and it is a compliment built on a category.

The Indians found in the county by the white settlers were of the Pottawatomie tribe, an inoffensive, quiet people, like all true Indians, much addicted to the chase.

The praise is for causing no trouble. The next sentence names the whites as the suppliers of the whisky and then calls the drinking the Indians' crime.

The chapter is signed by Dr. John H. Rerick, a LaGrange physician who wrote eight chapters of that volume and owned the county's newspaper.

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The whisky is not incidental. It is the county's early economy and both books say so plainly.

At Lima in 1829, Benjamin Blair let Ica Rice sell whisky to the Potawatomi out of his cabin. A man pledged his blanket for a drink and took it back without paying, so Mrs. Rice poured two or three pailfuls of water into the barrel. That is where the trade began. It ran on through 1830 and 1831 in whisky, blankets, beads, tobacco, lead and ammunition.

At Mongo, Brownell built a distillery beside his grist mill and sold most of forty gallons a day to the Indians, with now and then a few gallons to his white friends. The settlers, the 1920 history notes, appreciated the market for their grain.

Two distilleries in the county closed for the same reason, and the 1920 volume records it with an exclamation mark: the removal of the Potawatomi meant the demand for fire-water was not nearly so great.

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They farmed here, and both books tell the same story about it twice.

At Clearspring a party planted corn on Anthony Nelson's farm. They objected to his ploughing and harrowing, and when he began marking the patch out in rows their disgust was unbounded. The chief Kookoosh kept his men at work through it and they raised a very good crop.

The 1882 volume tells that as an anecdote about conservative farmers. The 1920 volume compresses it to a line about people disgusted at the way white men ploughed. In both, the objection is a quirk to be indulged and the crop is mentioned last.

Elsewhere the same volume says the Potawatomi at Lima had improved the land, and then adds, in brackets, as Indians did.

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Then, in the record, they are gone.

The 1893 atlas prints the year 1837 with seven entries. Van Buren Township constituted on the third of January. Newbury, Clearspring, Johnson and Milford on the sixth of March. Ontario platted on the first of March by Nathan Jenks. The Collegiate Institute begun. The Wolcottville Baptist church organised.

Then, sixth:

Pottawotamie Indians removed from the county.

Then the Baubauga road laid out.

Ira Ford's chronology, printed twenty-seven years later, gives 1837 one entry and nothing else at all.

Pottawattomie Indians removed from the territory.

The two records differ by one word, county against territory. Neither says who, or how, or where to. The 1882 history has no chronology entry for it whatsoever.

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The books do not agree about the year, and one of them does not agree with itself.

The 1882 history says 1839 in its physical features chapter, about 1839 in the Lima chapter, and before 1840 at Clearspring. Its Van Buren chapter has a distillery running until after 1840, when the removal came.

The 1920 history says 1839 in its Lima chapter and 1840 in its Van Buren chapter, and 1837 in its chronology.

And the 1920 history's own chapter on Indian occupancy says something different again, in detail: a council at Lake Ke-waw-nay in July of 1837, a party of some eighty conducted west that autumn, and the main emigration of about a thousand in the summer of 1838, under Colonel Abel C. Pepper and General Tipton.

By that account 1837 is the year of the meeting. It is the year both chronologies print, and it is the earliest of the eleven statements the record makes.

Neither book anywhere notices that it disagrees.

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There is no treaty in this county's record.

The 1882 volume's LaGrange chapters use the word treaty not once. They do not mention the Miami at all. There is no cession, no reserve, no acreage, no instrument, no signature, no payment.

Every treaty in the whole of this research is in the 1920 volume's Indian occupancy chapter, and that chapter is substantially about Noble County. The reserve it describes, with a brick house built for the chief Wawaassa under an agreement with the government, is in Sparta and Washington townships, in the next county south.

So far as this county's own histories record it, the land changed hands in a subordinate clause.

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Some did not go.

The 1882 history says many of them were anxious to remain, that they clung to their old St. Joseph country, and that even after it was thought all were gone a lone Potawatomi would sometimes wander back to the old hunting grounds. Its Lima chapter has an occasional straggler who had sorrowfully returned to view for the last time the happy home of his youth.

The 1920 volume records a band of about two hundred and fifty who asked to stay and were allowed to, and they settled at Silver Creek in Allegan County, Michigan. It records a few Miami who came back to Indiana despite the government and were permitted by act of Congress in 1858 to remain.

Not one of those passages names a person who stayed in LaGrange County.

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One account in the whole record describes the Potawatomi and the county's white settlers meeting as parties to a dispute, and it needs its own paragraph of caution.

In June of 1918 Ira Ford and three others from the Old Settlers' Society interviewed John Smith of Lima Township, who was ninety-five. Ford printed the result and vouched for it in his own voice, writing that it can be safely relied upon as historically accurate.

Smith said an Indian stole a horse thirty-five miles south, that the county's officers caught him and jailed him, and that the Potawatomi came in numbers to the county seat and camped there. The whites began a fort at Cedar Creek on the east side of Cedar Lake. He said there were as many as fifteen hundred Indians about, and matters looked alarming. Then a consultation was held, the whites compromised, the Indians undertook to keep the man away from these parts, the prisoner was released, and there was no more trouble.

Nothing else in four volumes records any of it.

The 1882 history confirms the man: John Smith, born in Clark County, Ohio, on the twenty-fourth of October, 1823, which is the date and county he gave in 1918. It also says his family came to this township in 1833, and Smith said 1835.

A fortification at Cedar Lake is in the record once, in the 1882 volume's Greenfield chapter, where families resolved to fortify the island during the panic of 1832. That is a different cause and a different year, and it is on the island rather than the east side.

And the fifteen hundred who gathered is the same figure Smith gave, a few sentences earlier, for the entire Potawatomi population of the county.

So the strongest thing in the record is an eighty-three-year-old memory of events its narrator was a child for, given at ninety-five, disagreeing with the earlier volume about his own arrival, and it is the only account anywhere of the two sides sitting down. This piece does not know whether it happened.

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The 1920 volume mourns them, and it does it on the same pages where it calls the living beggars and semi-wild.

It prints a burned village, at Indian Village in Noble County, where a number of heartless settlers applied a torch while the Potawatomi were away and burned all the wigwams. It prints an eye-witness of the 1838 emigration describing tears falling from the cheek of the downcast warrior, old men trembling and matrons weeping. It prints the returning parties, scores of them, breaking back to their old encampments and saying they would rather die than be banished from their country.

And then it prints eight lines of poetry beginning Ye say they all have passed away, and moves on.

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Here is what the county's own record holds.

A village whose name nobody could translate. A trade in whisky the books describe as enterprise. A corn crop mentioned last. Four different years for the removal across eleven statements. No treaty and no reserve. One clause in a chronology, between a church and a road. Seven words in another, with no destination. And one old man's memory that nothing corroborates.

The people are named where the books happened to name them. Mongoquinong. Shipshewana, who is buried on the north shore of the lake, or some distance east of it, depending which page you read. White Pigeon. Kookoosh, who kept his men working through the harrowing. An old chief, unnamed, who blessed every meal. Whitefeather, listed once in a column of Lima residents as an Indian doctor.

That is the whole of it.