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1838–1840
The Trail of Death did not pass through Lakeville — a documented negative, printed at route-record strength. The forced removal of Chief Menominee's band began at the Twin Lakes reserve in Marshall County, south of this town: after General John Tipton's militia surrounded the chapel gathering of 30 August 1838, the column — about 859 Potawatomi in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation's own account; the carriers vary between 849 and 859, with the deaths on the march between about forty and forty-two, and both variants print in this build's register — departed on 4 September 1838 and reached the Osage River country on 4 November, some 660 miles in 61 days. The documented first day's march runs south from the start: twenty-one miles from Twin Lakes to a camp at Chippeway, on the Tippecanoe River and the Michigan Road in Fulton County, then through Rochester the next day, and so down the Michigan Road to Logansport and beyond. Twin Lakes is south of Lakeville; a column that starts there and marches south never enters Union Township, which lies north of its starting point. That is the finding, and its caveat stands beside it, unmerged: two secondary carriers state that the roundup swept a wide catchment, thirty to fifty miles in radius — a radius that would reach this township's latitude — but no carrier reached names any person taken from Union Township or any roundup point in it, and no removal from Lakeville is asserted. The enrolling agent's journal and the Petit letters, read whole, are the settlers named in the note. The band that stayed stands at pointer size, as the land section's frame requires: Pokagon's band remained in the valley's north under the Treaty of Chicago of 1833, its villages in the Michigan ground north of the state line — Howard's county telling has it the last of the tribe to leave this vicinity, shifting within the valley in 1836 — and its modern standing is carried in the article below. Lyon's closing line of 1907, that there was not a full-blooded Potawatomi living in St. Joseph County "now," prints as a period statement of its date and not as a fact of this one: the federal statute of 1994 names this county in the Pokagon Band's service area expressly.