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1818–1840 — the largest private holding ever laid on this ground
The 1818 grants: Article 3 of St. Mary's granted Jean Baptiste Richardville, by patent in fee simple, a schedule of tracts that the Park Service's nomination totals at eleven sections — 7,040 acres. Five of the sections lay on the St. Marys south of the town: three sections beginning about twenty-five rods below his house on the river near Fort Wayne and running up the stream for quantity; two sections on the east side of the St. Marys, running east one mile along the line of the military reservation. Two more sections lay on Twenty-seven Mile Creek, where the St. Mary's road crossed it. The same article granted two sections on the St. Marys, one on each side of the river below the Greenville reservation, to Joseph Richardville and Joseph Richardville Jr., one section on the west side of the St. Marys to the chief Charley, and — by the count a federal court later summarized — tracts to twenty or more named Miami persons aggregating forty or more sections. Article 6 barred every grantee except Richardville from ever transferring his tract without the President's approbation. His alone were ordinary property: the nomination calls the unrestricted fee simple a breakthrough, and it made him, on paper and in fact, a landowner in the American sense while he remained principal chief.
The later grants: The schedule to the 1826 treaty added three and a half sections, two of them in present Fort Wayne: one section on the northwest side of the St. Joseph adjoining the old boundary line, and a half section on the east side of the St. Joseph below Chapo-tee's village. In 1834 the United States agreed to patent to him outright the ten-section tribal reserve at the Forks of the Wabash that the 1826 treaty had set apart, he holding, the treaty says, an Indian title to it. The 1840 treaty paid him 25,000 dollars under its fourth article and granted seven sections under its tenth. the Story of Fort Wayne section totals the whole series from the treaty summaries: 28,320 acres and 31,800 dollars in grants across the treaties of his career. His fortune as a whole — the 200,000 dollars in cash at his death in 1841 included — is accounted in the Wealth section; this section records only that the fortune's foundation was these instruments.
What became of the grants: The sections were sold off parcel by parcel across the following decades, by Richardville, his heirs and their buyers, and the St. Marys sections became part of the private map south of the city. One piece of the series outlasted the century in court: in Wau-pe-man-qua v. Aldrich (1886), the federal circuit court held that the three St. Marys sections patented under the 1818 treaty remained exempt from state taxation while held by Richardville's descendants whose tribal relation had not ceased — a title question born in Article 3, still being litigated sixty-eight years later.
Sources: Treaty with the Miami, 1818, Articles 3 and 6; NPS Richardville House NHL nomination (eleven sections, 7,040 acres; five sections on the St. Marys); Treaty with the Miami, 1826, schedule of grants to Article 3 (three and a half sections; the St. Joseph tracts); Wau-pe-man-qua v. Aldrich, 28 F. 489 (C.C.D. Ind. 1886); Treaty at the Forks of the Wabash, 1834, Article 4; Treaty with the Miamies, 1840, Articles 4 and 10; grant totals as carried in the Story of Fort Wayne section.