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20 SEPTEMBER 1828
This ground's Indian title was extinguished by one instrument, and the instrument's own terms are the record: The treaty concluded 20 September 1828 "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey Mission, by present Niles — between Lewis Cass and Pierre Menard for the United States and the Potawatomi (7 Stat. 317; proclaimed 7 January 1829) took two cessions. The first lay on the Michigan side: from the mouth of the St. Joseph up the river to a midpoint between two villages, then direct to the nineteenth mile tree on Indiana's northern boundary, west with the line to Lake Michigan, and down the shore — Michigan ground, ceding no acre of Indiana. The second is this ground's instrument. In the Indian Claims Commission's later accounting the two cessions are Areas 145 and 146; the Indiana cession, Area 146, contains the Mishawaka townsite, as the Mishawaka record establishes — and it contains this ground whole.
The second cession's own calls, as the treaty prints them, run: beginning at a point on the line run in 1817 due east from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, which point is due south from the head of the most easterly branch of the Kankakee River; from that point south ten miles; thence in a direct line to the northeast corner of Flatbelly's reservation; thence to the northwest corner of the reservation at Seek's village; thence with the lines of that reservation and of former cessions to the Indiana–Ohio state line; thence north with that line to the line run in 1817; and west with it to the beginning. Read on the ground: the cession is a band ten miles deep along the state's northern edge at its western end, its southern line leaving the ten-mile point on two diagonals to the corners of two reserves that stood southeast of this ground, in the Elkhart and Eel river country — reserves the calls use as survey marks, not as holdings here. At this ground's longitude the band takes Harris Township entire: the township lies within six miles of the state line, and the cession's floor at this meridian stands below it. The exact course of the southern diagonals through the sections south of the township — Penn Township ground, Mishawaka's frame, boundary-printed here — is fixed by the Claims Commission's plat of Area 146 and by the General Land Office tract books, and is named in this section's notes as the settling source; the behavioral proof on this ground needs no plat: the county's lands came into market under this cession in the spring of 1830, and the first entries in the county were made inside Harris Township, as the market entry below tells.
The reserve test the Fort Wayne standard requires was run against this ground, and its result is negative, printed whole. Article 3 of the same treaty granted eighteen individual reservations (the count is Wyckoff's, in his 2020 accounting of the treaty's grants, all of them in Indiana) — floating grants, to be located after the survey on land not already ceded, where the President should direct, with one express exclusion: no location was to be made on Elkhart Prairie, nor within five miles of it. The article itself fixes only two of the eighteen locations, both on the Eel River far to the south — a section for the wife of Peter Langlois, and a section for Betsey Ducharme at Louison's run. No Article 3 location on the ground of Harris or Clay township appears in any source reached for this section; the Mishawaka record ran the same test against the townsite sections with the same result. The settling source for the test at full strength is the same in both builds: the General Land Office's patents and the La Porte–Winamac tract books, where a located grant on these sections would have to appear. Until that pull is made, the printed result stands at the strength stated: no reserve on this ground is shown by the treaty text, the claims mapping, or the county histories.
Sources:
- Treaty with the Potawatomi, 20 September 1828, 7 Stat. 317 (text in Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. II, and the Avalon Project) — Article 1's two cessions with their boundary calls; Article 3's grants, their floating terms, the Elkhart Prairie restriction, and the two locations the article itself fixes on the Eel River.
- Indian Claims Commission, 27 Ind. Cl. Comm. 187 — Areas 145 and 146 for the 1828 cessions, as carried in the South Bend record in this build.
- Larry M. Wyckoff, "Potawatomi Reservations in Indiana and Illinois, 1818–1832" (2020) — eighteen reservations granted under the 1828 treaty, all in Indiana.