The Potawatomi ground

BEFORE THE SURVEY

The prairie was Potawatomi country before it was anybody's township: the ground that became Harris and Clay townships lay within the country of the Potawatomi, the people whose villages stood along the St. Joseph River, and it passed out of their hands with the rest of the county through the treaty-and-cession cascade of the 1820s and 1830s, instrument by instrument, before the removal era closed the question in the 1840s. Those instruments, the principal chiefs, and the removal itself are carried whole, at full depth, in the South Bend and Mishawaka builds and in the county leg that closes this county's sequence; the Story of Granger section states Granger's ground inside them and does not retell them at second hand. What the record reached for this ground itself must also be stated plainly, because the checklist asks: no battle, raid, or engagement touching this ground appears in the record, and no removal-march waypoint on this ground is documented in it. The defeat that did not happen here is printed as not here. What happened here is quieter and complete in its own way: a named prairie, a cession, a survey, and then, in 1830, the settlers the next entries name.

Sources:

1. The treaty and cession record as carried in the South Bend and Mishawaka builds of this program (pointed to, not retold).
2. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 1 — the county frame within which the Harris Township section sits.