The earliest white settler was Pierre Navarre, one of the fraternity of the _coureurs de bois_--a wild, rascally, fearless crew of half-breeds and renegade whites, who were the first to invade this famous hunting country. The succession of sheltered prairies, rounded sand-hills, and reedy marches cut by sluggish streams widening into lakes, made a good haunt for all game, especially beaver. Now the water is mostly drained away and the land reclaimed, but at one time much of the region could be passed over in canoes.
Pierre Navarre (1785-1874) was the son of a French army officer. Besides Canadian French, he could speak the Pottowattomie Indian dialect, and had some knowledge of woodcraft and nature signs. In his calling of fur trader he made friends with the Miamis and their chief, Little Turtle, and when the War of 1812 broke out, offered the services of the tribe to Gen. Hull, as well as his own. The offers were declined, so the flouted Miamis transferred their allegiance to the British under Gen. Proctor. So good a scout was Navarre that a reward of $1,000 for his head or scalp was promised by Proctor. "He used to say," writes an old chronicler who knew him, "that the worst night he ever spent was as bearer of a despatch from Gen. Harrison, then at Ft. Meigs, to Ft. Stephenson (now Fremont). Amid a thunderstorm of great fury and fall of water, he made the trip of thirty miles through the unbroken wilderness and the morning following delivered to Gen. Harrison a reply." He died in his 89th year at East Toledo.
The University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, with 1,200 students, is the largest Catholic school for boys and young men in the country, and the American headquarters of the worldwide Order of the Holy Cross. Notre Dame was founded in 1842 by Father Sorin, a Frenchman, who accomplished his object under great difficulties.
When Father Sorin arrived in Indiana in 1841, leaving behind a comfortable life in France for missionary work among the Indians, he found on the present site of Notre Dame only waste land covered with snow, and only one building, a tumble down log hut. With $5 to begin work of erecting a school, he started in courageously, and spent five days repairing the hut and fitting it up so that one half served as a chapel and the other as a dwelling for himself and 6 lay-brothers. In 1844 his little college was chartered as a university by the legislature of Indiana. Father Sorin was elected superior-general of the Order of the Holy Cross for life. Besides Notre Dame, he founded many other schools and colleges in the United States and Canada. He died at South Bend in 1893. His co-worker, Father Badin, was the first priest consecrated in the United States.