Howe
Sixty miles east of Bertrand's
Published .
On the thirteenth of October, 1824, the Governor of Michigan Territory wrote from Detroit to the Indian agent at Fort Wayne, to tell him which three men had been licensed to trade inside his agency.
Sir. Three licenses have been granted to traders from this place within the bounds of your agency. One to Jacques Vallad at Mongoakwünong, one to Francois Mettez at Beurelle's lodge on the Tippecanoe, and one to Charles Vermette at Morrain's village.
The first of those places is this county.
The county history published in 1882 says where it was, in a sentence about the Potawatomi.
One of their most important villages was Mongoquinong, now called Lima, and Ontario, from which trails led south to Fort Wayne, upon which was afterward built the "old Wayne road," north to the large Indian village once near the site of Mendon, Mich., westward to the St. Joseph Mission, and another to Haw Patch.
Lima is Howe now. The same book, writing about the ground the village stood on, says the trails "seemed to center from all directions upon 'Mongoquinong,' as a local point."
So in the autumn of 1824 the United States licensed a man to trade at the village where Howe stands. The first settlers arrived four years later, and the first trading post any county book records was opened by one of the Rice brothers in 1829.
Cass finished the letter with an instruction.
The two former are required to have their licenses endorsed by you. This is done, that you may have a control over them and observe their movements. They are all for one year.
Tipton wrote a note in the margin about the second man, "(Mettes trades at Checose villag)", and endorsed the sheet when it reached him: "from Govr Cass accompanying the licens of Mettes and Vallard recd 19 November 1824."
Vallad in the letter. Vallard in the endorsement. One man, two spellings, one piece of paper.
That is the whole of him.
Jacques Vallad appears once in the 1,761,000 characters of the volume that prints this letter, and not at all in the volume that follows it. There is no bond, no invoice, no return, no record of whether he came, no record of what happened when the year was up. Traders in the same agency get careers in these papers: Richard Chabert of Vincennes, who represented a Fort Wayne firm at English Lake and later traded at Turkey Creek Prairie; Joseph Bertrand at Parc aux Vaches on the St. Joseph. Vallad gets a line.
The following June, Cass sent Tipton a list.
It was headed "List of Places to be Licensed for the Indian Trade within the Superintendency of Lewis Cass, Governor of the Territory of Michigan", and Tipton endorsed it "Recd 18 June 1825 List of posts of Trade". It runs down the whole Northwest, agency by agency, from the Ottawa reservation on the Miami Bay to Pembina and the War road.
Under the Agency of Detroit, after Saginaw and Shiawassee and a village on the head of the Kalamazoo, come items nine and ten.
Village of Mangokois, 60 miles east of Betrands.
Village of the Prophet, 40 miles this side of Mongokois.
Then the list turns to the agency that actually contained the place.
Within the Agency of Fort Wayne. 1. Forks of the Wabash. 2. Mouth of the Massissineway. 3. Thorntown. 4. Mouth of Eel river. 5. Aubinaubees village, Tippecanoe river. 6. English Lake, Kankakee River. 7. Morrain's village. 8. Flat Belly's village. 9. Muskeegwünong.
The village is not in it.
Two things follow from that, and the second is the odd one.
The first is that the place was an official post of trade. It is on the government's own list of where a licence could be issued, with a number beside it, between Saginaw and the Prophet's village.
The second is where the government thought it was. Fort Wayne is about fifty miles south of the village, and the agent who had to endorse the licence and observe the trader's movements sat there. Detroit put the village on the Detroit list and fixed its position by measuring from Bertrand's trading post on the St. Joseph, in Michigan, which is about forty three miles away in a straight line and sixty by whatever road a trader would have used.
A place in northern Indiana, located from Michigan, licensed from Detroit, and watched from Fort Wayne.
The county's own book knew none of this, and says something that sits oddly beside it.
While, so far as known, the French traders erected no store building at the village, nor perhaps established no constant trading-point there, yet it is certain that the French were often there with Indian trinkets and supplies, strapped in packs on the backs of ponies.
That is not wrong. A licence for one year is not a store building, and a man trading out of a rented wigwam leaves nothing behind for a county historian to find in 1882. The two accounts are describing the same trade from opposite ends: one from the village, where nothing permanent was ever built, and one from Detroit, where the licence was written down.
By 1828 the county history counts about thirty wigwams left at Mongoquinong, scattered west along the Pigeon. In 1834 the Rice brothers had the place surveyed as a town and gave eighty four of its lots to the county for the seat of justice.
In between, for one year, it was a post of trade in the Superintendency of Michigan, sixty miles east of Bertrand's.
Sources
- Counties of LaGrange and Noble, Indiana. Historical and Biographical, F. A. Battey & Co., 1882. Internet Archive
- The John Tipton Papers, volume I, 1809-1827. Indiana Historical Collections XXIV, Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942. Internet Archive, from the Indiana State Library, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. Cited for two federal documents printed in it, the Cass letter of 13 October 1824 and the list of posts of trade received 18 June 1825. The edition's editorial notes are not quoted.
The Cass letter and the 1825 list of posts are quoted from the Indiana Historical Bureau's 1942 edition of the John Tipton Papers, volume I, pages 397 to 398 and 466 to 467, and every line quoted here was read off the page image of that edition rather than from its scanned text. The manuscripts are in the Tipton Papers at the Indiana State Library. Both documents are federal records and their text is in the public domain independent of the edition; the edition's own notes are not quoted. The Internet Archive copy is offered by the Indiana State Library under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence. The village is spelled four ways in the record: Mongoakwünong in the letter, Mangokois and Mongokois in the list, and Mongoquinong in the edition's index. A fifth form, Mongoquois, appears elsewhere in the volume and may be a different place or a man's name; it is not used here. The list spells the Michigan post "Betrands" and this piece's title regularises it. Battey's sentence about the French traders contains a double negative, "nor perhaps established no constant trading-point there", and is quoted as printed.