The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
30 September 1809 — Treaty of Fort Wayne, 7 Stat. 113
The transaction: Harrison came back to Fort Wayne in September 1809 and took the largest cession yet from the Miami, Eel River, Delaware and Potawatomi. The first article ceded two tracts: a strip thirty miles wide at its narrowest along the Wabash, running from the Raccoon Creek line toward the Vincennes country, and a second strip, twelve miles wide, between the Greenville line and the Grouseland line below Fort Recovery. The standard estimate of the whole purchase is about three million acres. None of it was the ground Fort Wayne stands on — the townsite tracts were already federal under Greenville, and the Miami's Fort Wayne country lay north of the new line. What the treaty took was the Wabash valley below the town, and with it the Miami's southern buffer.
The consideration: The treaty text is exact, and it is small: goods delivered to the amount of 5,200 dollars, and new permanent annuities of 500 dollars to the Miami, 500 to the Delaware, 250 to the Eel River tribe and 500 to the Potawatomi — 1,750 dollars a year in all, the Wea's consent to be bought separately for not less than 300 dollars a year more. An Indiana Historical Bureau account, quoted in the Story of Fort Wayne section, prices the immediate cost at roughly a third of a cent an acre. The following summer 1,779 Native people came to Fort Wayne for the annuity distribution; Tecumseh, whose Shawnee had not been parties, read the sale as theft of land held in common, and the road to Tippecanoe ran from this table.
Sources: Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), Articles 1–6, text via the National Archives treaty file as transcribed by the Allen County Genealogical Society (ACGSI); acreage estimate and per-acre pricing as carried in the Story of Fort Wayne section from the Indiana Historical Bureau account.