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Before 1795 — possession on the ground, claims on paper elsewhere
The ground: The land at the meeting of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers — the head of the Maumee, above the short portage to the Little River and the Wabash — was Miami country, and its capital town was Kekionga. The Miami held it the way the record everywhere shows: by occupation, council, burial and trade, with the town's council house the seat of the nation's government. That tribal history is told in the Tribes section; what this section records is how the paper title to that ground changed hands, transaction by transaction, until the map was private.
The paper claims: Over that possession, European and then American instruments laid claim after claim that never touched a Miami furrow. France claimed the interior by the La Salle-era assertions and governed it, thinly, from posts like the one at Kekionga itself. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 France ceded its claims east of the Mississippi to Great Britain. Britain's Royal Proclamation of 1763 then reserved the country west of the Appalachians to the Native nations and forbade private purchase from them — an admission, inside the claiming power's own law, that the land was not the Crown's to sell. Virginia claimed the Old Northwest by charter and by conquest, and ceded that claim to the United States in 1784. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 completed the frame: the United States took the right of preemption — the exclusive right to buy the land from its Native owners when they chose to sell — while the Ordinance's third article promised that Native lands "shall never be taken from them without their consent." Every transaction that follows in this section is the working out of that sentence: consent, in the form of treaties, taken cession by cession for forty-five years.
Sources: Treaty of Paris (1763) and the Royal Proclamation of 1763; Virginia's deed of cession (1784); Northwest Ordinance (1787), Article 3; the Kekionga record as carried in the Story of Fort Wayne section and the Myaamia Center's published history.