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Before 1828
At the start of the treaty era the townsite and all the country around it stood in Indian title. The valley of the St. Joseph and the Michigan Road corridor south of it was Potawatomi country — the nation whose chiefs treat with the United States in every instrument that touches this county — and the ground itself was unsurveyed, unentered, and unceded, lying south of the line run in 1817 from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan. No reserve had been laid on the townsite and no village on it is named in any record (the tribes section prints both tests whole). One grant class does run through this ground, and it is the exception that proves the frame: the Michigan Road grant of the 1826 treaty — a hundred-foot road strip and a section of land for each mile of it, at the state's disposal — whose selection record on the townsite's own sections is a named gap in this build's note. Apart from that corridor, when the cessions begin, this ground passes whole, once, by a single instrument. The instruments are taken in their order below, and the one that took the ground is printed first.