However, whether fact or fiction, much as been written about the Legend of Wahbememe:
“A Pigeon Creek”
Wahbememe and his band lived on the banks of the White Pigeon River, now known to us as White Pigeon Creek. This camping place was a permanent one, known along the Forst Dearborn-Detroit trail to both Indians and whites, even before the building of Fort Dearborn, and as a white settlement it was known among the first immigrants as a resting place on the route on father west.
Here Wahbememe, tall, athletic, brave, chivalrous, known throughout the tribe as swift as the deer, a splendid type of American Indian, lived until he was thirty years old.
With the reserve of the people, he watched from afar the first white settlers felling his trees, building their first log houses, tilling the prairie soil, shooting his game, catching the fish from the stream; but from the first he seemed to have taken a sympathetic interest I the little settlement, to have watched over it and cared for it in ways that came to him.
Then on day this young chief took the trail to meet at some Indian wallo-pee in the neighborhood of Detroit, so the story runs, and there he learned that his fellow chiefs did not look with complacency of the immigration of the whites; there he heard at the council fires, warriors who used all of their persuasive oratory to keep alive the hatred between the Indians and the whites; there he learned that his own village, the settlement on the banks of his own little creek, was to be the object of a surprise and massacre. Quietly he stole away from the council fires, and turning his face westward toward the wigwams of his own people and the cabins of his white friends.
He flew to the rescue of the handful of homes that he has learned to love.
It was a long, long trail, up hill and down, that he had chosen to follow, with rivers to swim and marshes to clamber through, not reckoning how much suspicion and how little gratitude of his white brothers waited him at this journeys end.
He knew that his own tribe would ostracize him, and he did not dare to wonder if the white men would thank him, but with a vision finer than that of either, he raced toward his goal.
He reached the settlement, he warned its men and women, he died.
And the little mound under the shade of the old oak tree was all that there was left for many and many a year to tell the bravest story that our country has left to tell. 1
1 Wahbememe – Chief Pigeon – The Bravest of Them All, Sturgis Journal October 3, 1959, From: “Wahbememe – Chief White Pigeon”, Reprinted from the True Tales of the Pioneer, By Alle Mac