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The county frame says Pokagon succeeded Topenebee in 1826. The treaty paper, read whole, shows a son holding his father's title while the leadership gathered elsewhere — both, printed
The succession in the county frame is one clean sentence: the elder Topenebee died in 1826, and Leopold Pokagon succeeded him as the valley's principal chief. The elder Topenebee died in the summer of 1826: the tribal-memory scholarship, working from a family archive, puts his death probably on 29 July 1826 near present Niles; the Kankakee school history's rougher telling has him fall from his horse drunk that July — the two accounts agree on the month and the year and on nothing else about the manner, and both print. What followed, in that same school history's plain words, is the half the county frame drops: "His son, Topennebee, then became head chief, but received little respect from his tribes. Just because a son's father had been a chief did not guarantee that the son would be accepted as chief." The modern chief lists carry the same man in the same place: Topinbee the Younger, on the St. Joseph River.
The treaty paper confirms the son in the title twice, at the two moments that matter most to this ground. At Carey Mission on 20 September 1828, in the instrument that took this ground, the second article provides that "one hundred dollars, in goods, shall be annually paid to To-pen-i-be-the, principal chief of the said tribe, during his natural life" — a life annuity written for a living man two years after the elder's death — and the signature roll is headed, after the commissioners, To-pen-e-bee, then A-bee-na-bee, then Po-ka-gon. Four years later, on the Tippecanoe on 27 October 1832, the clerks are still writing the same order: the third article grants "To To-pen-ne-bee, principal chief, one section: To Poch-a-gan, second Chief, one section" — and a section more to Poch-a-gan's wife. So through the whole cession era the United States did business with a principal chief named Topenebee who was not the man of Greenville, and styled Pokagon second. And yet the same years show where the valley's future was actually being decided: it was Pokagon's villages that took the Catholic mission in 1830 and acknowledged him as their leader in it; it was Pokagon who held out at Chicago in 1833; it was Pokagon's name, not the principal chief's, that the staying band would carry into the present. The record does not reconcile title and leadership because the valley did not: the title descended to a son the people would not follow, and the leadership gathered to the civil chief who could hold a people together — in the Kankakeeland telling's phrase, Pokagon was "the civil or peace chief of the first rank in the tribe," while Topenebee's house had held the war chief's name. When the 1833 supplementary articles come to describe the last tract, they name it by both houses at once: the land "on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated" — the dead elder's village keeping his name six years on, the living second chief's village beside it.
Two edges of this record stay open and are named as gaps in the note that accompanies this section. The younger Topenebee's death is not fixed in any source: he stands in the instruments through October 1832, and after that the roll of the valley is Pokagon's; the annuity rolls and the standard scholarly lives — Clifton's and Edmunds's — are the settling sources. And the popular statement that Pokagon "succeeded" Topenebee in 1826 is not so much wrong as two facts folded into one: he succeeded to the leadership of the valley's principal band across the years 1826–1833, while the principal chief's title, annuity and first place on the rolls remained, on the instruments' own showing, with Topenebee's son. this section prints the folded version nowhere and the unfolded version here, because the difference is not pedantry: the instrument that took this ground was signed in that double order, and the ground's title history is incomplete without it.
Sources: Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317), Article 2 and the signature roll — the life annuity to To-pen-i-be-the, principal chief, and the order of the marks, read whole (Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. II, via the Oklahoma State University and Yale Avalon texts); Treaty on the Tippecanoe River, 27 October 1832 (7 Stat. 399), Article 3 — "To To-pen-ne-bee, principal chief… To Poch-a-gan, second Chief"; supplementary articles, 27 September 1833 (7 Stat. 442) — the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon; the tribal-memory essay on the elder Topinabee — the death date probably 29 July 1826; "The Pottawatomis: History and Folklore of the Indians of Kankakeeland" — the elder's death in July 1826, the son's succession and the respect he did not receive, Pokagon as civil chief of the first rank (a school-compiled history, printed at that strength); the compiled chief lists — Topinbee the Younger on the St. Joseph River.