Project Scroll Research Note 2026-59: A chief named Shipshewana in Kansas and Washington in 1841 and on the Osage River muster roll of 1842: four records in the letters of the Office of Indian Affairs

The monument of 1931 at Shipshewana, Indiana, says that Chief Shipshewana died by the lake in 1841. The letters received by the Office of Indian Affairs from the Osage River Agency (National Archives microfilm M234, roll 642) carry the name in Kansas and in Washington in that year and the next. On 3 February 1841, at Potawatamie Creek on the Osage River, "Ship she wah no" was one of twenty-seven chiefs and warriors of the Potawatomi "who lately emigrated from Indiana & Michigan" who told the Secretary of War that Mucka moat and three others had gone to Washington with the Rev. Mr. Ketchum without the tribe's consent; the sub-agent Anthony L. Davis wrote that the letter "embraces the principal men of the late Emigrants with whom Meck E moote emigrated." On 22 March 1841 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, T. Hartley Crawford, told the Secretary of War, John Bell, that "immediate provision should be made for the return of the four Potowatomies, improperly brought here by Mr. Ketchum," at a cost estimated at 350 dollars, and Bell approved; an office note records that the party left on Sunday morning, 28 March 1841. On 16 November 1841 the chiefs, head men, warriors and young men of the St. Joseph and Prairie bands named "Ship she won no" third of six delegates to Washington in a petition to President John Tyler, and he signed it by mark; on 15 December 1841 "Ship she wan no" made his mark on the delegates' letter to Crawford from Washington. And on the muster roll of the Potawatomi of the Osage River Sub Agency taken by Davis on 12 October 1842, two heads of family are entered as "Shep She wi no": no. 179, with a household of eleven including one man over forty, and no. 277, with a household of three. Louise Barry's annals of 1963 summarised the February letter with five of its signers, not including this one; we have found the four records in no other publication.

Project Scroll Research Note 2026-59, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-59/.