Removal — what crossed this ground, and what did not

The documented forced removal did not cross Clay Township, or this county. The 1838 removal — the Trail of Death — was Menominee's band: some 859 Potawatomi marched from the Twin Lakes reservation in Marshall County from 4 September 1838, by Logansport and down the Wabash to Kansas, arriving 4 November, more than forty dead. Its marked route runs through Marshall, Fulton, Cass, Carroll, Tippecanoe and Warren counties — south from Twin Lakes, never north into this county; St. Joseph County is not among them, and no carrier gives a route through Clay Township for any removal column. And one band of this valley did not remove at all. Leopold Pokagon's Catholic Potawatomi of the Bertrand reach stayed: the federal findings in the Pokagon Restoration Act state that in the Treaty of Chicago 1833 "the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians was the only band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan," its supplementary article of 27 September 1833 reserving that right; in 1840 General Brady's removal order exempted thirteen families — 106 people, patent-holders headed by the Pokagon family — who were told they could remain until the President's pleasure was known; and the military attempts that followed were halted by Associate Michigan Supreme Court Justice Epaphroditus Ransom. The carriers differ by a year in form — the Band's own account dates Pokagon's obtaining Ransom's assistance to 1841, the Michigan state marker dates Ransom's declaration to 1840 — and both dates print with their carriers, unmerged, here and in the note.