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Lore and legends of the valley

Things in the dark

Monsters at the edge of the berry fields, a serpent in a spring-fed lake, a warning chalked on a tree. Every county keeps its stories. We take each one back to the oldest record we can find, and tell you which parts hold up, which don’t, and what nobody had noticed before.

• Lore and legendThe Thunderbird of the St. Joseph River Valley: One Spirit, Many PeoplesThe Thunderers of the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Odawa and their neighbors, and their enemy under the water.
• Lore and legendPrincess Mishawaka: the princess who never wasWhere the legend came from, and what the name really means
• Lore and legendThe Indian Lake Sea Serpent: Twelve Feet Long, and ShyMen went out with guns. Then it came back.
• Lore and legendThe True Story of the Dewey Lake Monster: The Week the Valley Went WildThe legend everyone knows is mostly wrong. The record is stranger.

How we test a legend

1. Find the oldest telling. Not the newest blog post: the first time it was printed, and who printed it.
2. Read the records around it. Newspapers of the week, the county histories, the maps, the land entries.
3. Mark every statement. Each one carries a Scrollsign, so you can see what the record says and what is our reading of it. What the marks mean ›
4. Say what is new. When we find something no telling has mentioned, it goes on the Discoveries page.

Most of the places in these stories are private land and private shores. Please enjoy them from public roads, and never disturb a grave or a marker.

…the distant echoes, as it were, of the glacial age, indicating in whispers the time when the dominion of water was complete over all this country.”

L. H. Glover, A Twentieth Century History of Cass County, Michigan (1906)