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The frame stands in Before the City — the columns, the toll, the fugitives. What this section adds is the valley's own kin inside the machinery, and the Nottawaseppi course on the same river
The removal of this valley's people was administered, in part, by the valley itself. The conductor's contract for Indiana's removal went to Alexis Coquillard, the South Bend trader whose name stands in the 1828 treaty's own claims schedule at two hundred dollars; and the great caravan of the fall of 1840 — some five hundred Indiana and Michigan Potawatomi crossing the Mississippi at Quincy toward Kansas — was interpreted by Abram Burnett. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation's published family history gives the interpreter his lineage, and the lineage is this valley's chief line: Abram B. Burnett was the adopted son of Abraham Burnett, the trader's son of Kaukima — Kaukima, daughter of Nanaquiba, sister of Topenebee — and in the Nation's telling he was Chief Chebass's own grandson, Chebass being Topenebee's brother and a chief of this river at Bertrand. The man who lent the column its voice, in the Nation's words "helping lend a voice to his people," was the old principal chief's great-nephew by one line and his brother's grandson by another. Removal, on this river, was not an abstraction administered from Washington; it was conducted by the valley's trader and interpreted by the valley's chiefly kin, and the record is the sharper for printing both facts without softening either. Those who would not go went where the geography let them: north to Canada, where British agents had bid ten dollars a head for them, as Coquillard warned Brady in May 1840; into the woods; and across the state line into the Pokagon villages, where the exception's ground absorbed the removal's fugitives — the three destinations the companion leg names, deepened here by the Nottawaseppi parallel that follows.
For the valley had a second band that would not stay removed, on the same river, and its course is the Nottawaseppi band's. Their reserve — first set apart under the Chicago treaty of 1821, enlarged and consolidated to ninety-nine sections at St. Joseph in 1827 — stood on the St. Joseph in Michigan; the Chicago treaty of 1833 extinguished it with the rest. In 1840 the Huron Potawatomi, as the band's own published timeline heads the entry, were forced to relocate to Kansas. But the bands of John Moguago — who led the band from 1839 until his death in 1863 — and of Pamptopee escaped the removal or broke from it, and by 1842 the returnees were back on the Nottawasippe prairie. On 10 June 1845 the community purchased its homeland in the only tenure the age left open to it, the tenure Pokagon's band had already used: fee simple, the Pine Creek Reservation in Calhoun County, Michigan, some one hundred twenty acres at its founding, bought with the people's own means under a federal act that granted forty-acre parcels. The parallel is exact and this section draws it without inflating it: two bands of the same treaty world, on the same river system, kept a Michigan homeland through the removal era by purchase — Pokagon's by treaty right negotiated before the fact, the Nottawaseppi band's by return and purchase after it. The difference matters as much as the likeness: the Pokagon Band was never put on the road at all, and the Nottawaseppi were, and came back. Their modern course runs with the modern nations' article below.
Sources: the removal frame, the Coquillard contract and correspondence, the Quincy caravan and Chapman's sentence, as carried in Before the City and the Mishawaka history; Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Cultural Heritage Center, "Burnett family history" (2025) — Abram Burnett, the adoption, the Chebass descent in the Nation's telling, and the interpreter's service on the Trail of Death; Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 603) — the claims schedule, Coquillard's two hundred dollars; the Nottawaseppi Huron Band's published historical timeline — 1821, 1827, 1833, 1840, 1842, and the Pine Creek purchase of 10 June 1845; the Bureau of Indian Affairs' summary under the criteria, Huron Potawatomi, Inc. (1995), as digested in the Cranbrook thesis on the Pine Creek Reservation — Moguago's leadership 1839–1863, the six founding families, the escape and return.