Round fire, mystery river

White Pigeon, Mich. In the summer of 1828 Christopher Bair, a Pennsylvanian who had served in the War of 1812, drove his stakes into the prairie where the village of White Pigeon now stands. His sons came with him. The youngest, William, was thirteen. The family spent the winter on Crooked Creek, near the line of the future Chicago Road, and the next year moved north to Prairie Ronde, in Kalamazoo County, where Christopher was the fourth settler on the prairie.^1,2,3

William grew up there among Potawatomi families, and the county biography of 1892 says he “learned to converse fluently” with the children.³ Many years later he wrote down the names he had heard for the land. In 1911 they were printed in the county history under the heading “Items by William Bair”: one short paragraph, and almost every line of it hides a mystery.¹

The old man’s names

Here is what Bair wrote, in the 1911 book. Documented The Indian name of White Pigeon, he said, was “Katakee-qui-nawk,” meaning white pigeon. Prairie Ronde was “Wau-ash-quitak,” meaning “round fire.” “Nottawa-seepe means ‘in comes the river.’” Gull Prairie was “Am-sam-quitak.” And “All names for prairie end in a word which means ‘fire’ (Squetak), the Indians having seen them on fire.”¹

Then, in the only sentence where he speaks for himself, he gave the river: “St. Joseph river was named ‘Saw-gau-seepe.’” An old Indian, he wrote, told him that twin sisters had drowned in it, and that the river took its name from them.¹

Bair was writing down sounds, not spelling a language he had studied, and he was writing them down long after he had heard them. So each name below is set beside the Potawatomi and Ojibwe dictionaries of today and beside other settlers who heard the same words.

A prairie is a fire

Bair heard something real. Documented The Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s dictionary gives the word for fire as shkodé, with a second form, shkwedé: very close to Bair’s “squetak.”⁴ The word for a prairie is mshkodé. In the closely related Ojibwe language the pair is mashkode, a prairie or natural clearing, and ishkode, fire.^5,6

The two words sound so alike that Europeans confused them long before Bair. Documented In the 1600s the French called the Mascoutens, a prairie people, the Nation du Feu, the Fire Nation. The Handbook of American Indians of 1907 says that name was a mistranslation: in Ojibwe “fire” is ishkote, which “might easily be substituted for mashkode, ‘prairie.’”⁷

Reading Linguists have not shown that the word for prairie grows out of the word for fire. But anyone who watched the openings burn each autumn, as Bair did, could be forgiven for thinking so. Fire is what kept the prairies open.

The round fire

Bair’s Prairie Ronde, “Wau-ash-quitak, meaning ‘round fire,’” is the great round prairie around Schoolcraft, south of Kalamazoo.¹

New finding Documented Bair’s name is a second, separate record of a name the Kalamazoo pioneers also wrote down. The county directory of 1869 gives “Wa-we-os-co-tang-scotah,” which “may perhaps be rendered — The round fire-plain, or, as the French had it — Prairie Ronde.” The county history of 1880 has “Wa-we-os-co-tungsco-tah … meaning the ‘round-fire plain.’” And E. Lakin Brown of Schoolcraft wrote a poem called “Wa-we-os-co-tang.”^8,2,9

Reading The two recordings sound alike at the start and the end. Both begin with a sound like the Ojibwe waawiye-, round, and end with the prairie word.⁵ The French name, Prairie Ronde, round prairie, translates what the Potawatomi already called it, and the treaty of 1821 used it for a Potawatomi village on the prairie.¹⁰

The river of the Naadowe

“Nottawa-seepe means ‘in comes the river,’” Bair wrote.¹ Here his memory went astray. Documented The name itself is solid. The Treaty of Chicago of 1821 set aside “one tract at the village of Na-to-wa-se-pe, of four miles square,” and in 1833 the reservation at “Notawasepe” was given up.^10,11

Reading The usual reading is naadowe and ziibi. Bishop Baraga’s dictionary of 1853 gives nadowe as an Iroquois and as “a kind of big serpent,” and later writers render it “enemy” or “adder.”^12,13 The town of Nottawa, the township and the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi all carry the name today. Settlers gave it other meanings too: the Kalamazoo history of 1880 calls Paragon Prairie, on the Kalamazoo River, “Notawa-see-pe, a prairie lying by a river.”² Nothing in the word itself means “in comes the river.” That meaning fits a different name much better: the river’s own.

The mystery river

Bair called the St. Joseph “Saw-gau-seepe.”¹

New finding Documented His name for the river matches one written down entirely separately, in Indiana. In 1908 the Indiana historian Jacob Piatt Dunn, working with a Potawatomi man named Topash, recorded it as “Sahg’-wah-se’-be, which may be translated ‘Mystery River.’” Sahg’-wah, he explained, was something that springs up without any known seed. Topash said the name came from a legend of a stranger found on the riverbank, whom no one ever knew.¹⁴ Notre Dame’s magazine has given the same word as Sheggwe, “happened spontaneously.”²⁵

Reading The Miami, who lived on the river before the Potawatomi, called it something close: saakiiweesiipiiwi, “outlet river.”¹⁵ A root meaning “coming out” may be the “in comes the river” that Bair remembered, fastened in his notes to the wrong name.

Documented A Potawatomi dictionary of today, Wiwkwébthëgen, gives the river another name: senathwen zibé, “river with a rocky flow.” Its note recalls the river before the dams, when the rapids made it hard to travel.¹⁶

The twin sisters

The twins did not stay in Bair’s notebook alone. Documented In 1899 Charles H. Bartlett of South Bend, writing with Richard H. Lyon, called the river “the Sauwk Wauwk Sil Buck of the Pottawatomies” and spoke of the legends that cling to its “willow-fringed shores,” without telling them.²⁸ In 1904 Bartlett told the story in Tales of Kankakee Land. The Potawatomi, he wrote, called the river the Sau-wau-see-be, “softened down from Sauk-wauk-sil-buck,” and the name recalled two women, twin sisters, drowned in the stream. The old men said the Spirit of the River had taken them, and from then on demanded two lives each year.¹⁷ A history of southwest Michigan in the 1920s repeated it briefly.¹⁸

Bartlett names no source. Reading Bair’s is the only version that says where it came from: an elder, speaking to a boy who knew his language, on the river itself.

White Pigeon’s other name

Bair gave the village’s own name first. “The Indian name of White Pigeon was Katakee-qui-nawk, and means ‘White Pigeon.’”¹

That is the puzzle. Documented The chief the village is named for was Wahbememe, the name carved on his boulder in 1909.^19,26 It is built from two words: waab-, white, and mimi, pigeon, which is the Potawatomi word for the bird today.⁴ Simon Pokagon began his essay on the wild pigeon in 1895 with the same word: the bird “was known by our race as o-me-me-wog.”²⁷ Baraga’s dictionary of 1878 gives “white pigeon” as wabomimi.⁶ Reading Bair’s word has neither part.

Reading It is closer in sound to an Ojibwe word for a bird with spotted feathers.⁵ Whatever Bair heard on Crooked Creek in the winter of 1828, it may have been a name for the place itself and not a translation of the chief’s. The wild pigeons that once filled the skies over the prairie were rose and slate blue. In the old photograph below, a white pigeon shares a perch with two of them.

Gull Prairie

Bair’s Gull Prairie, “Am-sam-quitak,” ends with the prairie word, as he said every prairie name did.¹ Reading The first part matches no word for gull in the dictionaries; the Ojibwe word is gayaashk.^5,6 It may be a name for something else entirely on the prairie north of Kalamazoo, where Gull Lake lies.

The bee hunter

Bair’s paragraph ends with a family boast. James Fenimore Cooper, it says, “took, as some state, the brother of Mr. Bair (John Bair), as the ‘Bee Hunter’ in his ‘Oak Openings,’” and Cooper and Mr. Bair “at an early date, ate ripe cherries together in Kalamazoo.”¹

Documented Cooper’s letters and his daughter’s memoir put him in Kalamazoo and on Prairie Ronde in June 1847, again in October 1847, and from 24 to 28 June 1848. Cherries ripen in late June, so the dates fit. He wrote in his journal on 1 January 1848 that he had begun “Oak Openings.”^20,21 The novel ends with the author visiting old “General Boden,” the bee hunter grown grey, at Schoolcraft on Prairie Ronde.²²

Documented John Bair was certainly the type. In 1828 he followed an Indian trail north to Prairie Ronde and wrote his name in red chalk on a bur oak by the lake, meaning to claim the spot; Judge Bazel Harrison settled it that fall.² But at least four men were later said to be Cooper’s bee hunter: Harrison, the strongest local tradition; Towner Savage, on the word of a judge who said Cooper told him so; a hunter named Walker; and John Bair. Cooper’s son searched his father’s papers for an answer and found none.^23,2,24

Like the old man’s names for the land, the bee hunter belongs to more than one family’s memory.

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