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Every reserve checked, the result printed whether positive or negative — the floating grants of 1828, the self-fixed grants on the Eel, and the two real reserves across the line
The reserve test for this ground was run in the Mishawaka build for the townsite and re-run in Before the City for the upland; this section prints the whole test once, at the depth the instruments now support, because the 1828 treaty has been read whole. 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, eighteen reservations in the standard study's count (Wyckoff, 2020), all in Indiana, none of them placed by the instrument itself except two: the grant to Peter Langlois's wife, fixed by the treaty's own postscript "upon the north side of Eel river, between Peerish's village and Louison's reservation," and Betsey Ducharme's half-section "at Louison's run" — both on the Eel River, in the Wabash country, a hundred miles from this ground. The article forbids any location "upon the Elkheart Prairie, nor within five miles of the same" — the Elkhart prairie, in the next valley east — which is as close as the instrument comes to this county, and it comes as a prohibition on ground it still is not. For this ground the test's result is threefold and entirely negative: no grant under the 1828 treaty is located on the Harris Prairie upland or anywhere in St. Joseph County in the treaty texts, the county histories, or any source reached; Louison's own house and cornfield, the one grant the instrument ties to a dwelling, stand unlocated in every source reached — the General Land Office patents and tract books are the settling record, and the question rides as a named gap, not a silent negative; and the labourers clause for "the band living upon the reservation South of the St. Joseph" names a reservation no source reached can fix to a place, printed in the companion leg as the open clause it is.
Near this ground — across the line, on Michigan soil — the reserve record is real, and the contrast is the finding. Pokagon's village held a reservation by the second article of the Tippecanoe treaty of 27 October 1832, quoted in the treaty-side article above: a band reserve, for his band, at his village on the St. Joseph opposite the Niles shore. The Nottawaseppi reserve, consolidated at ninety-nine sections by the St. Joseph treaty of 19 September 1827 out of the tract first reserved in 1821, stood on the same river up in Michigan. And the villages tract of the 1833 supplementary articles — some forty-nine sections "on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated" — ran down to the Indiana line and stopped at this ground's north fence. Every reserve the paper made for this valley's people stands on the river or beyond the line; the upland south of the line, this ground, was ceded clean in 1828 with nothing reserved out of it — no band reserve, no chief's section (the individual sections of 1832 were likewise to be selected under the President's direction after survey, and none is located in this county in any source reached), no mission tract, no school land for the nation. That is the reserve test's whole result, and it is why the ground's settler history could begin, as the companion legs tell it, with a survey and a land office and nothing in between.
Sources: Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317), Article 3 with the postscript locations and the Elkhart Prairie prohibition, read whole; Wyckoff, "Potawatomi Reservations in Indiana and Illinois, 1818–1832" (2020) — eighteen reservations under the 1828 treaty, as carried in Before the City; Treaty on the Tippecanoe River, 27 October 1832 (7 Stat. 399), Article 2 — the reservation at Po-ca-gan's village and the Notta-we-sipa reservation; Treaty of St. Joseph, 19 September 1827 (7 Stat. 305) and the supplementary articles of 27 September 1833 (7 Stat. 442) — the Nottawaseppi consolidation and the villages tract, as carried in Before the City.