The taking: the Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 — the second cession

20 September 1828 · 7 Stat. 317 · Royce Area 146

The townsite was ceded by the second cession of the Potawatomi treaty concluded at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph on 20 September 1828. The instrument — articles of a treaty made at the missionary establishments on the St. Joseph of Lake Michigan between Lewis Cass and Pierre Menard, commissioners, and the Potawatomi tribe, proclaimed 7 January 1829 (Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. II, read first-hand) — cedes two tracts in its first article. The second is the one that takes this ground, and its calls are quoted whole: "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 Kankekee river, and from that point running 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 the said reservation, and of former cessions, to the line between the States of Indiana and Ohio; thence, with the same to the former described line, running due east from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan; and thence, with the said line, to the place of beginning." Bounded by its calls, the tract is the band of country south of the 1817 line and east of the Kankakee-head meridian, its southern edge starting ten miles below the line at the west and running away east-southeast to the reservations. Tested at the townsite point (the 2020 Gazetteer internal point, 41.528472° N, 86.275381° W, read directly from the Census file), limb by limb: the town stands 5.57 miles SOUTH of the 1817 line, inside the band; EAST of the Kankakee-head meridian on every placement of that derived line the record offers, by the thinnest margin of this plot; 3.77 miles NORTH of the mapped southern boundary; and far west of the tract's eastern reach at the Ohio line. The calls take the townsite. The town's own modern plan narrative attributes the change to "a treaty" of 1832; the plotted record does not support that attribution for this ground, and the conflict prints whole in this build's register — the 1832 instruments took the ground around Lakeville, west and south, and by their own calls did not take the townsite.