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Before the City marched the instruments as they touch this ground. This article reads the same paper from the nation's side — who stood on it, what it paid, and where its line runs out
The treaty of 20 September 1828 was concluded at the Missionary Establishments on the St. Joseph — Carey Mission, Isaac McCoy's Baptist station opposite present Niles — and its signature roll is the valley nation's council in one column of marks: near seventy names, as the roll is printed, each with his x. The head of the roll is the succession article's order — To-pen-e-bee, A-bee-na-bee, Po-ka-gon — and the names that follow run out across the whole Potawatomi world of 1828: Louison, who appears twice in the roll as printed and who holds the third article's one self-placed grant, "a reservation of one section, to include his house and cornfield"; Ash-kum, a chief of the Kankakee and Illinois country; Wa-ban-see, Wabaunsee, whose name belongs to the same downriver world; Moran, of the trader family the instruments everywhere reward. A ground's title does not pass on a village's signature; it passes when a nation's council, gathered from three rivers, sets its marks in order — and the order of the marks is the political map of the nation that ceded this ground, with the St. Joseph men first because the ground was theirs to cede. The consideration the second article writes is the treaty system's standard anatomy, printed whole in the companion leg — a permanent annuity of $2,000, $1,000 a year for twenty years, $30,000 in goods, tobacco, iron and steel by the year, education money, a blacksmith forever, labourers for the band on the reservation south of the river in the clause no source reached can fix to a place — and one line that is not standard: the hundred dollars a year in goods to the principal chief for his life, the title's price, paid to the son.
The paper's afterlife is the part of the cession record that belongs to this section, and it runs in three entries. First, the claims accounting: the Indian Claims Commission numbered the 1828 cessions Michigan Area 145 and Indiana Area 146, as the Mishawaka leg established — the cession of this ground lived on as a docket for a century and a half. Second, the last paper recognition of the old order: in October 1832, at the Tippecanoe, the second article reserved "the reservation at Po-ca-gan's village for his band" out of the cession — the future band of the exception, written into the record as a reservation-holder a year before Chicago — while the third article was still styling its head "second Chief." Third, and closing the thread: when Congress restored the band's federal services in 1994, it did not describe the band as a community with a treaty past. Its first finding names the Pokagon Band "the descendant of, and political successor to, the signatories of" eleven treaties, and the list it recites is the cession era's own table of contents — Greenville 1795, Grouseland 1805, Spring Wells 1815, the Rapids of the Miami 1817, St. Mary's 1818, Chicago 1821, the Mississinewa 1826, St. Joseph 1827, St. Joseph 1828, the Tippecanoe River 1832, Chicago 1833. The treaty that took this ground stands ninth in the list. The legal line from the roll at Carey Mission to the nation that governs at Dowagiac today is therefore not an inference this section draws; it is a finding Congress enacted, and the ground's title history — ceded in 1828 by a council headed by Topenebee's son and Pokagon, succeeded to in law by the band those men's Catholic villages became — is complete in a way few parcels' title histories are.
Sources: Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317) — the roll of marks read whole, Articles 2–3, the claims schedule at 7 Stat. 603; Treaty on the Tippecanoe River, 27 October 1832 (7 Stat. 399), Articles 2–3 — Po-ca-gan's village reserved for his band, the grants in their order; Public Law 103-323, §1(1) (25 U.S.C. §1300j(1)) — the eleven treaties and the successor finding; Indian Claims Commission Areas 145 and 146, as carried in the Mishawaka history and Before the City.