Princess Mishawaka: the princess who never was

Mishawaka, Ind. Outside City Hall stands a bronze of a young woman with a bow. Mishawaka calls itself the Princess City, and for more than a century its people have been told why: the town was named for Princess Mishawaka, daughter of the Shawnee chief Elkhart, who was loved by a white scout called Dead Shot and wounded by a jealous rival called Gray Wolf.

It is a good story. It is also, as the evidence shows, a story with an author, a publisher and a date, written as fiction by a Michigan judge in 1875 and attached to Mishawaka about thirty years later. This is the history of a legend: where it came from, how a city adopted it, and what the name Mishawaka really seems to mean.

The story as it is told

DocumentedThe version on the city’s monuments runs like this. Around 1800 the Shawnee lived along the St. Joseph under their great chief Elkhart. His daughter, the princess, was beautiful and brave. A warrior named Gray Wolf wanted to marry her and was refused. In a war between the Shawnee and the Potawatomi she was wounded, by Gray Wolf in some tellings, and rescued by a white frontiersman known as Dead Shot, who killed Gray Wolf and married her. The falls of the river were named for the hero, and the town, the tablet of 1932 says, for her.

DocumentedThe bronze tablet unveiled in 1932 says she “was buried near this spot in 1818, dying at the age of thirty two,” that she was “the central figure in two local Indian wars,” and that “our city was named in her honor.”

A judge in Allegan, 1875

DocumentedEvery element of that story is in a book published at Allegan, Michigan, in 1875: Legends of Michigan and the Old North West, by F. J. Littlejohn. Flavius J. Littlejohn, born in 1804 in Herkimer County, New York, had come to Allegan in 1836. He was a lawyer and surveyor, served in both houses of the Michigan legislature, and was a circuit judge from 1858 to 1865.

DocumentedIn his preface Littlejohn says the legends “were originally penned by the author for his own amusement … under the nom de plume of ‘Old Trailer.’” He dedicated the book to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and opened it with lines from Hiawatha. He also claimed that his tales were a “close approximation” of real frontier life.

DocumentedThe first tale is “The Shawnee and Pottowatomie War; or, The Michigan Scouts of 1800–1,” and it runs from page 9 to page 128. In it, “the Shawnees acknowledged the authority and princely rule of Elkhart, their Grand Sachem.” A white hunter “born and reared near Buffalo” has won the nickname “Dead Shot.” A Shawnee named Gray Wolf “much want to find Elkhart’s daughter. Last year him want Mishawaha for wifie. Elkhart say no.” At the end, “Dead Shot and Mishawaha were united in marriage.”

DocumentedNew findingRead closely, Littlejohn’s book does not say what the later legend says. His princess is named Mishawaha, not Mishawaka. “Mishawakee” is a separate village in his story, one that already exists “near what is termed ‘the South Bend’ of the St. Joseph River.” Most of the action takes place in Michigan, at Three Rivers, Prairie Ronde and the Kalamazoo. And Littlejohn never says that the Indiana town was named for his heroine.

DocumentedNew findingThe tales seem never to have been printed before 1875; the book’s subtitle calls them “a cluster of unpublished waifs.” Some were still unpublished in 1919, when the state’s Michigan History Magazine printed one from a manuscript lent by the author’s nephew, E. C. Butler, and his wife, of Allegan. Its editors were frank about the rest: the tales “were not written originally for publication,” and “unquestionably much of the narrative is strongly tinctured with the author’s imagination.” They still thought its “pictures of Indian life, manners and customs” were “true enough”; but that was written a decade after Mishawaka had adopted the princess.

ReadingLittlejohn wrote romances in the manner of Fenimore Cooper and Longfellow, about a frontier that had vanished in his own lifetime. His dialogue for Native characters, broken English and all, is the stage dialect of nineteenth-century fiction, not the record of anyone’s speech. The book is a novel in all but name.

“unquestionably much of the narrative is strongly tinctured with the author’s imagination.”

What the town knew before

DocumentedThe town had a name long before Littlejohn wrote. It was platted on 15 July 1833 as St. Joseph Iron Works, after the bog-iron works that brought its first settlers. Chapman’s county history of 1880 says that when a post office was opened, “the Indian name ‘Mishawaka’ was given it at the suggestion of Mr. Yerrington, who was appointed postmaster.”

DocumentedNew findingChapman dates the post office to the spring of 1834. Henry Yerrington’s own letter puts it earlier. Writing to Senator John Tipton on 4 September 1833, under the heading “Mishawaka, St Joseph Iron Works,” he explained that “on the 9 of May last” he had sent in “an application for the establishment of a Post office at this place by the name of ‘Mishawaka,’” because the settlers had to travel “four and some ten miles” to the office at South Bend. The office was established on 11 December 1833, with Yerrington as postmaster, according to the Indiana State Library’s index of post offices, cited by the editors of the Tipton Papers; the federal register of 1835 lists “Mishawaka — Hy. Yerrington.”

ReadingSo the name Mishawaka was in use, and asked for in writing, two months before the town was platted under another name. The Richmond Palladium reported on 17 May 1834 that “the Iron Works at Mishawaka, near South Bend, have made a successful commencement.” In 1838 the legislature joined the Iron Works, Indiana City across the river and their neighbors as the town of Mishawaka.

DocumentedChapman explains the name without a princess. “Mishawaka” was “the name of an Indian village that once occupied Taylor’s Addition,” and “it signifies ‘Swift water,’ or as some render it, ‘Thick-woods rapids.’” A pioneer doctor who arrived in 1836 remembered it the same way: “The swift water at that point, it is said, gave it the Indian name of Mishawaka.” Howard’s history of 1907 thought it meant “Big Rapids,” after “the great falls in the river at this point.”

“it signifies ‘Swift water,’ or as some render it, ‘Thick-woods rapids.’”

ReadingThe silence is the evidence. Chapman wrote five years after Littlejohn’s book, and Howard thirty-two years after, and both discussed the name at length. Neither mentions a princess, a Chief Elkhart, Dead Shot or Gray Wolf in doing so.

The story moves to Mishawaka

DocumentedNew findingThe first local link between a woman named Mishawaka and the town’s name that we have found is a short item in the South Bend Tribune of 26 January 1907, quoted in Howard’s history: “Tradition says that here the Indian chief, Elkhart, and his bride, Mishawaka, after whom this city was named, are buried.” In this first version she is Elkhart’s bride, not his daughter.

DocumentedNew findingTwo years later the full story arrived. The Witwer Genealogy of America, printed at South Bend in 1909, includes a “Legend of Mishawaka” and gives its source: “Mr. E. A. Journegan, engaged in writing a sketch of early pioneer days, unearthed an interesting tradition of still earlier times.” Here Elkhart is “famous to the far points of the compass as being the father of Princess Mishawaka,” Gray Wolf has become “a sub-chief of the Pottawatomies,” and Dead Shot carries the princess “to his cabin, near the falls.” “In his honor they named the falls in the river ‘Mishawaka,’ and in later years, the town that grew about it they gave the name of Mishawaka.”

DocumentedOn 4 July 1909 Mishawaka opened its new Hotel Mishawaka with a Historical Pageant, and the story went on stage. Frederick Eberhart played Chief Elkhart and Jennie Skelly played Princess Mishawaka, arriving by canoe. The pageant’s souvenir pamphlet, printed again in the Rushville Daily Republican that August and in the South Bend News-Times in 1923, called her “perhaps as notable a character as Pocahontas,” and said the falls were named “Mishawaka Falls,” meaning “Swift Running Water.”

DocumentedNew finding“Journegan” is a misprint, and the man behind it was the town’s best-known newspaperman. Edward A. Jernegan, born at La Porte in 1846, had been a drummer boy in the 73rd Indiana; in 1872 he bought the Mishawaka Enterprise, and Howard wrote in 1907 that “the name of Jernegan has become almost synonymous with that of the Enterprise.” He was the town’s postmaster under President Harrison and sat in the legislature in 1897. No other E. A. Jernegan, Jernigan or Journegan appears in any Mishawaka record we have searched. He died on 2 March 1922.

DocumentedHis family carried the story forward. Howard’s biography of Ralph H. Jernegan, a young Mishawaka lawyer, names his parents as “Ed A. and Nannie C. (Sherman) Jernegan,” and it was Ralph H. Jernegan who would chair the Lions Club committee that raised the princess’s memorial in 1931–32. A paper by the elder Jernegan, “Early Pioneer Stores,” is cited from the city historian Vincent Brunner’s papers at the Mishawaka library; whether he ever printed his “sketch of early pioneer days” in full, perhaps in his own paper, we have not found.

ReadingThe Witwer book says only that Jernegan “unearthed” the tradition, not that he wrote it, and nothing we have found shows where he got it. What is clear is that the 1909 texts follow Littlejohn’s plot closely, his war of 1800, his Elkhart, his Dead Shot and his Gray Wolf, while adding the one thing Littlejohn never claimed: that the town was named for her. The 1907 “bride” fits a half-memory of the same book, in which Mishawaha ends as Dead Shot’s bride, and the two forms ran side by side for years: a pastor’s radio talk of 1925 still had the region named for Elkhart “and his wife.”

DocumentedNew findingNot everyone took the princess up at once. Seven years after the hotel pageant, South Bend’s Indiana Centennial Association staged The Historic Pageant of St. Joseph County on 3–5 October 1916, with most of the Mishawaka scenes performed by Mishawaka High School. They showed the building of the town, its blacksmiths, its mills and a spelling bee. There is no princess, no Elkhart, no Dead Shot and no Gray Wolf anywhere in the printed program, which gives the name a plainer gloss: “It was said by Alexis Coquillard that the name Mishawaka, meant ‘rapid water between wooded banks.’”

How a city adopted a princess

DocumentedNew findingOnce the story had a home, Mishawaka put it to work. In February 1914 a businessmen’s dinner had solos by “Princess Mishawaka.” In 1920 the News-Times ran a feature by Elisabeth Steele, who wrote that “records show” Dead Shot had lived with the tribe ten years and gave the princess a death year of 1814, and then a poem with her own drawing.

DocumentedIn 1925 the Lions Club’s Booster Week held a “Princess Mishawaka” popularity contest, with votes earned by shopping; Vera Hatfield won, and was paraded in costume as “the Indian princess from whom Mishawaka took its name.” A junior-high essay contest that week taught the story as the city’s beginning, and a local pastor told it on the radio. In 1926 the Chamber of Commerce adopted a seal bearing the princess’s head.

DocumentedIn 1931 the Lions Club began raising money for a memorial. The city’s historian, Vincent Brunner, told a banquet that he had identified the princess’s grave from the memories of three old settlers, and a Chicago sculptor, Christian Petersen, was consulted. One reader wrote to the paper that it “would be a far more humane act to organize a free clinic for children.” It was the only objection we found.

DocumentedFor the city’s centennial in May 1932, the D.A.R. provided “the large native boulder” and the Lions Club the bronze tablet, which declared that the princess “was buried near this spot in 1818” and that “our city was named in her honor.” The death date had moved four years since 1920. Petersen made a clay model of the princess in 1933, but the full-size statue did not come until 1987, when the city placed a bronze by Sufi Ahmad at City Hall.

DocumentedGenerations of schoolchildren met her. A “Princess Mishawaka” was crowned at Mishawaka High School homecomings in the 1940s; a 1944 teachers’ journal described a classroom unit on finding her grave; and an annual Princess Mishawaka contest was still being held around 1970. The WPA’s state guidebook of 1941 told the story to the whole country.

Was there a Chief Elkhart?

DocumentedNo record we have found shows a Shawnee chief named Elkhart. The name of the Elkhart River, and of the county and city that took the river’s name, was explained by the state historian Jacob Piatt Dunn in 1909 as a translation of the Potawatomi name of the stream, which “refers to an island at its mouth, which resembled an elk’s heart in shape.” The linguist Michael McCafferty, in his study of Indiana’s Native place names (2008), traces it to the same “elk heart.”

ReadingNor have we found evidence of a Shawnee town on the St. Joseph about 1800. Littlejohn himself placed Elkhart’s Shawnee “occupying the Wabash Valley.” The story has even run backward: Alan McPherson, in Indian Names in Indiana (1993), reports that local historians had come to derive the name of Elkhart from the fictional chief.

What the name means

DocumentedThe name is real and much older than the legend; only its meaning is in doubt. The early settlers heard “swift water” or “thick-woods rapids” in it; a history of Notre Dame printed in 1888 has “swift-running water,” and the 1916 pageant program “rapid water between wooded banks,” on the word of the trader Alexis Coquillard. Dunn, in his True Indian Stories (1909) and again in 1912, gave the Potawatomi m’sheh’-wah-kek, “country of dead trees,” meaning “a deadening,” a stand of timber killed by fire or storm. McCafferty’s modern reading, mšwakig, is “at the firewood-tree land.” None of these authorities derives the name from a person.

ReadingOn the evidence, Mishawaka was named in 1833 for a place, a Native village or locality on the river at the rapids, at the suggestion of its first postmaster. The princess came seventy-six years later.

The legend as a kind of story

ReadingPrincess Mishawaka belongs to a large family of American “Indian princess” stories, in which a chief’s daughter loves a white man, suffers for it, and gives her name or her blessing to the place the settlers make their own. The pageant writers of 1909 made the comparison themselves, to Pocahontas. Such stories said more about the towns that told them than about the Native people they claimed to remember, and they flourished in exactly the years Mishawaka’s did, in pageants, booster weeks and centennials.

DocumentedOthers have said so before us. McPherson called it “the fictitious legend” and “the romantic, but untrue story,” and placed its birth at Three Rivers, Michigan, where Littlejohn set it. The History Museum in South Bend writes that “more likely the name was part of a fictional story to drive tourism to the city,” and the city’s own published history speaks of “legendary Princess Mishawaka and her supposed grave site.” The statue and its plaque, though, still tell the story.

Story or record? Play along

Now that you have read the record, try these six. For each claim, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the record says.

Questions we answered

A timeline

• 1833 Henry Yerrington applies for a post office named Mishawaka, 9 May; St. Joseph Iron Works platted, 15 July; the office opens, 11 December
• 1834 The name in print, 17 May
• 1838 The settlements joined as Mishawaka
• 37 years later
• 1875 Littlejohn’s Legends of Michigan: Mishawaha, Elkhart, Dead Shot, Gray Wolf
• 1880 Chapman: the name means “swift water”; no princess
• 27 years later
• 1907 First local tie of the woman to the town’s name
• 1909 The Witwer genealogy, crediting E. A. Jernegan, and the Hotel Mishawaka pageant
• 1916 The county centennial pageant: no princess
• 1919 Michigan History Magazine: Littlejohn’s tales “strongly tinctured with the author’s imagination”
• 1920 Elisabeth Steele’s story and poem
• 1925 Princess Mishawaka contest in Booster Week
• 1932 Centennial boulder and tablet
• 55 years later
• 1987 Bronze statue at City Hall
• 1993 McPherson calls it “the fictitious legend”

Test yourself

If you go

DocumentedThe 1987 bronze stands at Mishawaka City Hall. The History Museum in South Bend and the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library hold the city’s history. Littlejohn’s book can be read free on the Internet Archive.