Chief Wawasee

CPart 2, by Jo Ann Merkle Vrable, Feature Writer

The other Miami chieftain was Waw-wa-esse, or Wawasee, often contracted into Wawbee. In the mid-1830’s, Wawasee’s village was situated near the southeast corner of Lake Wabee, approximately two and one-half miles southeast of Milford including the eastern shores of Lake Wabee. Chief Wawasee was a minor leader but a brother of Flat-Belly. Like his brother, Wawasee was big and strong. This chief dressed up for special occasions by wearing a large silver ring that hung from the cartilage of his nose. He sometimes substituted a fish bone for the ring, according to James W. Armstrong in The History of Leesburg and Plain Township Indiana published by the Leesburg Journal.

The Indians of this county only lived on reservations a few years, approximately from 1832 to 1838 or 1840.
Between 1826 and 1834 the Miami chiefs here ceded most of their lands to the whites. One of the last of the Miami treaties was in October 1834, at the Forks of the Wabash. The Potawatomies and Miamis were forced to sign these treaties. White bootleggers supplied the Indians with booze to get drunk while the government men spurred the Indians to sign, says Adams. Stashing the Indians on reservations did not work. The Indians hunted for food and the reservations were too small to supply enough game to feed members of the tribes. So the Indians and their children were hungry and began to steal in order to survive.

The Kosciusko County Indians did not want to leave. The Indians of this county were not exiled from here in one large group. Rather, they were escorted to Kansas in small groups of approximately 50 persons each. And the men who led the groups of Kosciusko County Indians to the new Kansas reservations were usually white fur traders who bid for government contracts to oversee the sad departures, Adams says.

By 1840, many Pottawatomi and Miami Indians had been expelled from Kosciusko County. But there were still some Indians here. Several homesick Indians returned to Kosciusko County after they were transplanted in the west, according to Adams. Flat-Belly and Wawasee escaped from Kansas and came back to their lands near Syracuse and Milford, respectively. But government men were hunting the runaways and the Indian brothers fled to Michigan where all tracks of them were lost, states Adams. The last Indians of Kosciusko County were removed to Indian territory in 1848.

In August 1880, Reub Williams wrote a newspaper account of that final exodus:”…although I was quite small, I well remember their (the last Kosciusko County Indians) passage through Warsaw with their ponies; their guns; dogs, squaws, and papooses, making as motley a crowd as one might not expect to see more than once in a lifetime. There were a few who still remained. Old Benack refused to go…Topash with the two boys…Dominique and Joanita, removed to Michigan. But little has ever been learned from those who removed to the Indian Territory…”

To learn more about the bust of Chief Wawasee, click HERE