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What the written record establishes about a town on this exact ground — re-tested in this section against the standard village lists, the band's own town list, and the treaty calls themselves
Before the City printed the negative: no village, no chief, no band is named for the Harris Prairie upland in any source reached. This section re-runs the test at the tribal record's own depth, because a negative is only as good as the lists it was checked against, and the lists deserve to be named in print. The standard compiled list of Michigan Potawatomi villages — Bawbee's Village, Big Wolf, Cheenauge, Macousin, Mangachqua, Matchebenashshewish, Moccasin, New Village, Nottawaseppi, Pokagon, Prairie Ronde, Saint Joseph, Topenebee, Wolf Rapids and their fellows — is a list of river towns in Michigan; south of the state line it names nothing on the upland between the river's bend and the line itself. The staying band's own published list of its towns, the villages united in the Pokegnek Bodewadmik as the band's scholar John Low records it — Hartford, Rush Lake, Dowagiac, Niles and Buchanan in Michigan, and South Bend in Indiana — stops at the same places: river towns, and the one Indiana town is the city at the bend, not the prairie above it. The treaty calls tell the same story from inside the instruments. When the 1828 treaty needs a landmark on this river it names villages — "half way between La-vache-qui-pisse and Macousin village" — and Macousin, Moccasin's town at Moccasin Bluff in Berrien County, is the kind of place the record names: on the water. The 1833 supplementary articles cede "the tract of land on the Saint Joseph River, opposite the town of Niles… on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated" — again, river ground, across the line. No instrument names a town in the ten-mile strip the 1828 second article took in Indiana, and no county history supplies one: Howard's and Chapman's Indian passages for the county, read in the companion legs, name the valley's peoples and their river towns and pass the upland by.
The verdict stands, and it is worth stating what kind of fact it is. This is not a record that was lost; it is a record that never singled the ground out, because the ground's role in the nation's geography was use, not seat: the hunting ground, the field ground, the travelled ground between the river towns below and the chiefs' towns at the line above, as Before the City frames it. A test that keeps returning the same answer from the tribal lists, the instruments and the county histories is a settled negative, and it is printed here at full size so that no later hand has to wonder whether it was ever run. What would change it is named at the record's edge, at the end of this section.
Sources: the compiled Michigan Potawatomi village list (the tribal-histories compilation carried) — the river towns named, none on this ground; Low (2011) — the staying band's town list: Hartford, Rush Lake, Dowagiac, Niles, Buchanan, South Bend; Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317), Article 1 — Macousin village as a boundary call; supplementary articles to the Treaty of Chicago, 27 September 1833 (7 Stat. 442) — the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon on the tract opposite Niles; Howard (1907) and Chapman (1880), as read in the companion legs; Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County (Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875) — the county history's general sentence on the Potowatomie as principal occupants, at the strength the reached text supports.