Timeline From The Past: First Indians In Kosciusko County
From the Files of the Kosciusko County Historical Society
Editor’s note: This is a retrospective article that runs a few times a month on InkFreeNews.
September 1999 — Roy and Barbara Hamer, of Leesburg, were the lucky purchasers of a single winning ticket in the Sept. 18, $41 million Powerball jackpot. They chose the cash option. After taxes, the Hamers received more than $15.4 million.
September 1989 — A man who shot and killed a Nappanee police officer was sentenced to a 110-year prison term Thursday in a plea bargain deal to avoid a death sentence.
Michael R. Steele, 25, admitted shooting Sgt. Brant “Butch” Nine with the officer’s own weapon and firing a shot at a second officer, who was not harmed.
The shooting occurred Nov. 3 at East Newcomer and Son Jewelers in downtown Nappanee.
Sept. 19, 1974 — Trash and garbage from the city of Warsaw are still being dumped in the municipal landfill on West Center Street, and an official with the Indiana Stream Pollution Control Board has ordered the site closed immediately.
The city landfill’s location at the edge of Walnut Creek, which drains into the Tippecanoe River, has been a matter of dispute between the city and the pollution control board for two years.
1750 — The first Indians who lived in Kosciusko County were Miami. They arrived in the area in approximately 1750 and built villages along the Tippecanoe River.
Between 1765 and 1795, some Potawatomi Indians came to this county too, according to J. F. Everhart, in the Combined Atlas Map of Kosciusko County, Ind. 1879, published by Kingman Bros., “Aboriginal History.”
By the late 1700s, the Potawatomi were a stronger band of Indians than the Miami. So the Kosciusko County Potawatomies seized the Miami Indian villages that were located along the Tippecanoe River, near the present sites of Warsaw, Atwood, Leesburg, Oswego and Clunette.
At this time, the Potawatomi also took over some Miami villages in Wabash County, located along the Wabash River, according to Marion Wallace Coplen in the History of Kosciusko County Indiana to 1875.
Bone Prairie, located on Armstrong Road between Leesburg and Oswego, may have been the site of a great battle between the Miami and Potawatomie sometime between 1795 and 1800, says Coplen. Bone Prairie was a small field of flat earth which was later part of the land owned by Donald and Juanita Boggs, Hershel and Helen Albert and Bert J. Anderson.
– Compiled by InkFreeNews reporter Lasca Randels