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1838 and 1840–43, in this section as the build's checklist requires — the columns dated, and this ground's count named as a gap
The Trail of Death, 1838: The reserve the Tippecanoe treaties carved at Twin Lakes, in Marshall County one county south, was sold under the Yellow River treaty of 5 August 1836 — a signature Menominee himself protested, on 4 November 1837, had been forged for him. The deadline passed on 5 August 1838. Governor Wallace authorized General John Tipton; the militia surrounded the village at the end of August; the rolls recorded 859 people. The column set out on 4 September 1838 and walked 660 miles in 61 days to the Osage River country at present Osawatomie, Kansas: 42 dead, 28 of them children; 756 arrived. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation's own account adds what the official record softens: the militia burned the fields and houses as the wagons departed, and the leaders rode shackled in a wagon at the column's head. Fr. Benjamin Marie Petit, who had served the valley's Pokagon Potawatomi from November 1837, followed the column and died at St. Louis on 10 February 1839. The route ran south and west, through Logansport and Danville: it did not pass the rapids, and it did not pass this ground — but the people it took were this valley's people, from the reserve one county below the ground this section covers.
Indiana's removal, 1840–43: Indiana's removal was a separate operation from Michigan's, run under the treaty provisions of 1834 and 1836 on its own appropriation — General Samuel Milroy first in charge, then General Hugh Brady as superintendent of emigration — and its conductor's contract went to the valley's own trader, Alexis Coquillard. His reports to Brady in May 1840 survive in the record: British agents in Canada were bidding $10 a head, plus clothing and provisions, for the Potawatomi to come north instead; Coquillard urged that the western emigration begin first. Chapman's county history closes the story in one sentence, quoted whole in both floor files of this build and quoted whole here: "they were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard." The destination word is Chapman's. Against it stands the caravan record: one column of about 500 Indiana and Michigan Potawatomi crossed the Mississippi at Quincy in the fall of 1840, Abram Burnett interpreting, on the road across Missouri toward Kansas. The two statements are carried unharmonised, as the Mishawaka and South Bend legs carry them: the county history's word and the caravan's road do not meet, and this section does not make them. Those who escaped the columns escaped to Canada, to the woods, and to the Pokagon villages across the line — the exception's ground absorbing the removal's fugitives, as it was positioned to do.
This ground's count — a named gap: How many of the removed came from this ground, no narrative source reached says. The muster rolls of the removals survive and are the basis of the modern compilations; a count for the Harris Prairie upland — for the families of the upcountry between the river towns and the line — would come from the rolls, name by name, and not from any history. It stands as this section's named gap, with the rolls as its settling source, in the note that accompanies this section. What the record does say is structural and it is enough: the people of this ground were the valley nation's people, their chiefs' towns stood at Niles and across the line, and between the deadline of 1838 and the last column of 1843 the nation that had held the upland was gone from it — except for the one band whose article, faith and fee-simple ground held, a few miles north of the fence the surveyors had already run.
Sources: The Trail of Death record — Menominee's protest of 4 November 1837, the rolls, the column's dates and toll — as carried in the South Bend leg of this project from the standard accounts; the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's account — the burning and the shackled leaders; the Petit record, as carried in the Mishawaka history; Chapman (1880) — the removal sentence quoted whole; the Coquillard–Brady correspondence of May 1840 and the Quincy caravan record, as carried in the Mishawaka and South Bend legs — the removal's administration and the unharmonised destination; the muster rolls named as the settling source for this ground's count.