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28 November 1840 — Treaty with the Miamies, 7 Stat. 582
The transaction: The last cession was negotiated at the Forks of the Wabash by Samuel Milroy and — the record's own irony — Allen Hamilton, Fort Wayne's banker, acting unofficially as commissioners for the United States. The first article is one sentence long in effect: the Miami ceded "all that tract of land on the south side of the Wabash river, not heretofore ceded, and commonly known as 'the residue of the Big Reserve.' Being all of their remaining lands in Indiana." The tribal estate in Indiana, which in 1818 had still been measured in millions of acres, was reduced to the patented individual reserves of the preceding entries.
The consideration: 550,000 dollars — of which 250,000 was to be paid in twenty equal yearly installments, and 250,000 of the fund was set apart to pay the tribe's just debts contracted before the treaty's date, a clause that routed much of the price straight to the trading houses. Richardville took 25,000 dollars under the fourth article and seven sections under the tenth; the Godfroy children took 15,000 under the fifth. The eighth article set the clock: the tribe would remove within five years to a country west of the Mississippi — a tract the treaty estimated at 500,000 acres in what became Kansas — at federal expense, with a year of rations on arrival. The acreage of the cession itself is one of this record's honest variants: the Indian Claims Commission's findings put it at about 491,000 acres; the Myaamia Center's account, as carried by the Allen County Genealogical Society, says 511,000 acres of the Big Reserve remained; the Indiana Historical Bureau rounds it to 500,000. All three are printed here; none is suppressed. The removal came in the fall of 1846, by canal boat down the Wabash — the tribal story is the Tribes section's to tell; the land story ends with the surveys and sales that followed the emptying map.
Sources: Treaty with the Miamies, 1840, Articles 1–8, Kappler II / 7 Stat. 582; Miami Tribe v. United States, 281 F.2d 202 (1960), summarizing the Indian Claims Commission findings (about 491,000 acres); Myaamia Center, "Removal — the Treaty of 1840" (511,000 acres); Indiana Historical Bureau (500,000 acres).