The taking, instrument by instrument

Every treaty and cession touching this ground, in order — the series that left it, and the one that took it, in 1828

Chicago, 29 August 1821 — the negative that opens the series: The Potawatomi cession at Chicago in 1821 took some five million acres of Michigan country — and left Indiana's St. Joseph valley in Potawatomi title. It is the series' necessary first entry precisely because it does not touch this ground: the valley's title stood untouched after it, and the instruments that follow are read against it.

Mississinewa, 16 October 1826 (7 Stat. 295): The treaty of the Mississinewa took a Maumee-side tract up Fort Wayne's St. Joseph River, a ten-mile strip along Lake Michigan, and the Michigan Road grant — a hundred-foot strip with a section of land for every mile of road. The St. Joseph of Lake Michigan's valley, this ground's river, it left untouched: the text is carried from the South Bend leg, where it was read.

St. Joseph, 19 September 1827 (7 Stat. 305): A year later, at the St. Joseph, the United States consolidated the scattered reserved tracts of Michigan — ninety-nine and a half sections — into the single ninety-nine-section Nottawaseppi reserve. Michigan ground, and no part of this section's; it is printed because it shows the method a year early, on the same river, before the same commissioners' world turned to Indiana.

St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317) — the taking of this ground: The treaty was concluded "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — at Carey Mission — by Lewis Cass and Pierre Menard for the United States, and proclaimed on 7 January 1829. Its first article took the Michigan side: from the river's mouth up the St. Joseph to a point halfway between La-vache-qui-pisse and Macousin village, then to the state line and the lake. Its second article took northern Indiana, and its calls are this ground's calls, printed as the instrument prints them: beginning on the line run in 1817 due east from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan — this ground's north fence, surveyed the year before — at the point due south of the head of the most easterly branch of the Kankakee: the portage headwaters, where La Salle's crosses had stood, are a boundary call inside the instrument that took the upland. From that point the line ran south ten miles, then by the corners of the reservations at Flat Belly's and Seek's villages and the lines of former cessions, to the Ohio line. Everything north of the ten-mile line and east of that beginning — Harris Prairie, Section 11, the whole of this section's ground — passed by this article. The Indian Claims Commission's accounting numbers the cessions Michigan Area 145 and Indiana Area 146. The consideration stands in the instrument: a permanent annuity of $2,000, $1,000 a year for twenty years, $30,000 in goods, and the working provisions — labourers, a blacksmith, tobacco, iron, and education money — that the treaty era wrote into its takings.

The floating grants — the reserve test on this ground: The treaty's third article granted individual tracts to named persons "to be located upon the second cession… where the President may direct, after the country may be surveyed" — floating grants, unlocated in the instrument: two sections to chief Au-bee-nan-bee, one section to Louison "to include his house and cornfield," and the rest of the list. The standard study of the reservations (Wyckoff, "Potawatomi Reservations in Indiana and Illinois, 1818–1832," 2020) counts eighteen reservations under the 1828 treaty, all in Indiana. But the article's only self-fixed locations are on the Eel River, in the grants to Peter Langlois's wife and to Betsey Ducharme "at Louison's run"; the article forbids any location "upon the Elkheart Prairie, nor within five miles of the same"; and for this valley's ground the test run in the Mishawaka build returns here unchanged: no grant under the 1828 treaty is located on the Mishawaka townsite in the treaty texts, the county histories, or any source reached — and none on this ground. Where the floating grants finally fell, the General Land Office patents and tract books would say; they stand named in this build's notes as the settling source, and the question is carried as a named gap, not a silent negative. One clause of the instrument resists every reading reached: its provision of labourers for "the band living upon the reservation South of the St. Joseph" names a reservation no source reached can fix to a place. It is printed as the open clause it is.

Tippecanoe, October 1832 (7 Stat. 378 and companions): The Tippecanoe treaties of October 1832 ceded most of the remaining Potawatomi land in northwestern and north-central Indiana and carved the last reserves out of the cession: Menominee's reserve at Twin Lakes in Marshall County, one county south of this ground, and — in the treaty of 27 October 1832 — "the reservation at Po-ca-gan's village for his band," expressly reserved. This ground was not in these instruments; it had passed four years before. The reserves they carved frame the removal entry below.

Chicago, 26 September 1833 (7 Stat. 431), and the supplementary articles, 27 September 1833 (7 Stat. 442): The last instruments of the series close over this ground's north fence without entering it. The treaty of Chicago took some five million acres in Illinois and Wisconsin and set removal west within three years. The supplementary articles of the next day took the Nottawaseppi reserve — the ninety-nine sections of 1827 — and "the tract of land on the Saint Joseph River, opposite the town of Niles, and extending to the line of the State of Indiana, on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated, supposed to contain about 49 sections," for $100,000. The villages tract's southern edge is the Indiana line: the last cession of the valley ran down to this ground's northern fence and stopped, because this ground's own title had already passed, five years earlier, at Carey Mission. The same supplementary articles carry the stay provision that the exception entry takes up whole.

Sources: The treaty texts at 7 Stat. 218 (Chicago, 1821), 7 Stat. 295 (Mississinewa, 1826), 7 Stat. 305 (St. Joseph, 1827), 7 Stat. 317 (St. Joseph, 1828), 7 Stat. 378 and companions (Tippecanoe, 1832), 7 Stat. 431 (Chicago, 1833) and 7 Stat. 442 (supplementary articles, 1833), as read and carried in the Mishawaka TRIBES and South Bend BEFORE THE CITY legs of this project — the 1828 calls, consideration and floating grants from the text; Indian Claims Commission accounting, Areas 145 and 146, as carried in the Mishawaka leg; Wyckoff, "Potawatomi Reservations in Indiana and Illinois, 1818–1832" (2020) — the eighteen reservations of 1828; the reserve test on this valley's ground as run in the Mishawaka build and re-stated for this ground here.