Truly a bad place

For fifteen years a Fort Wayne merchant sold whisky at a log tavern in Johnson Township to Potawatomi who came, the county history says, in great numbers. It records that without comment. It calls the same building truly a bad place only after white men started using it.

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The place existed because of where two trails met.

One ran southwest from the vicinity of Toledo and one ran to Fort Wayne, and they crossed near the Lake of the Woods, a little north of which stood a log building the whole region knew as the Tamarack House. That building already has a piece on this site: how it was put up, what it was made of, who kept it and what happened in it.

This is about the man who owned it, and about what the county's books did to its reputation.

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He was a Frenchman at Fort Wayne named Francis Comparet, and in 1832 or 1833 he sent men north to open a station.

The 1882 county history gives his firm two names in the same sentence, Comparet and Bowrie, or Comparet and Cuttieaur. The 1920 history prints only the first and drops the other, so one of the two partners survives in one book.

What they sent men to do is stated without any adjective at all.

A small cabin was at first built, but later a double log building designed for a hotel was erected, in which the traders had a small stock of goods, including whisky, which they sold to the Indians, who often came there in great numbers.

A small stock of goods, including whisky. That is the whole of the county history's opinion of it.

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The trade ran both ways and the books record one exchange of it.

The Potawatomi were in the habit of bringing venison to the settlers' cabins and trading it for potatoes, beans, pumpkins and corn. Occasionally somebody brought a bear steak. They had a large temporary village on the west bank of Oliver Lake and they came to the cabins to barter, to beg or to borrow.

That is the only sentence in either book about what was actually traded. Everything else about the Tamarack and the Potawatomi is about drinking.

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Comparet was not only a trader here, and the county owes him something odd.

When the legislature came to fix where this county's seat of government would be, it appointed five commissioners to do it. One of them was Francis Comparet of Allen County.

So the man selling whisky to the Potawatomi at the Tamarack was one of the five men who chose where LaGrange County would put its courthouse.

He had another post between Kendallville and Rome City where settlers and Indians met, and a priest visited it. And in December of 1838 he laid out a village in Noble County called Northport, and the record is blunt about what he did there.

After laying out the village he opened a store there, in which he sold calico and a few groceries, but his principal article of trade was whiskey, which he sold to white and Indians alike.

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In 1837 the Potawatomi were removed from this county.

The county atlas gives it a line in a list, between the constitution of four townships and the laying out of a road. Nothing in any of these books connects the removal to the Tamarack.

What the record does show is what Comparet did next.

In about 1838 he bought the mill and the land at the Tamarack and opened a good store in another building. In 1844 he built a three-storey grist mill. About 1845, or at least just before his death, he built a second sawmill.

The Indian trade ended and the business got bigger. No source in this archive remarks on that, and this piece does not claim one caused the other. It is the order things happened in.

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Then he died, and the books change their minds about the building.

No source gives the year. What they give is the auction: at his death his goods were sold out at auction, and the property went to his sons. In 1856 O. P. Grannis bought it and held it until 1879, and in 1866 the mill cleared three thousand dollars.

And in the same chapter, a few sentences on, the Tamarack becomes a noted resort for the blacklegs, with hiding places in the swamps, stolen horses secreted nearby and bogus coin passing through. Then this.

Men living in the neighborhood assisted them in the concealment of stolen property and the disguise of their personal identity.

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Read that against the earlier passage and the difference is not the whisky.

The same building sold liquor to Potawatomi who came in great numbers, and the book that records it uses no adjective at all. It became a bad place when white men used it for something else.

And the people the sentence condemns are the neighbours. Men living in the neighborhood assisted them. Those are settlers, hiding property and disguising men, in a county that had been theirs for twenty years.

The judgement arrives with the customers, not with the trade.

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The 1920 history keeps that sentence and adds to it at both ends.

Ford's Tamarack became a resort of bad men, bad women and bogus money. Bad women are in no sentence of the 1882 book about this place.

He also supplies a state of mind that no earlier source records. The whites, he writes, had a bad impression of the people there from their first introduction, which is offered as a fact about the whites and rests on nothing he cites.

And he files the whole account of the first settlement at the Tamarack under a heading the 1882 book does not use: Another "First Settlement" Theory. The quotation marks are his.

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One more thing sits in this story and neither book puts it together.

O. P. Grannis bought the Tamarack mill in 1856 and held it for twenty-three years.

He was also the secretary of the first Regulator company organised at the Tamarack, the vigilance association formed to deal with exactly the horse thieves and counterfeiters the place had become known for.

The man who bought the trader's mill kept the minutes of the committee formed against what the trade had turned into.

Thirty-seven years after that, the plat above still letters TAMARACK in the corner of the township, with three Granniss parcels beside it.