The death of the principal chief: Menominee, 15 April 1841

c. 1791 – 15 April 1841 · the removal record and the Sugar Creek parish register tradition

The cession cascade has its closing beat: the chief who would not sign died in exile in Kansas, two and a half years after the removal. Menominee, the Potawatomi chief and religious leader whose village stood at Twin Lakes — the Myers and Cook lakes, some five miles southwest of Plymouth in Marshall County — refused his mark to the Treaty of Yellow River in 1836, and his refusal is the hinge the land file's cascade already turns on. When the removal came, he went with his people: 859 Potawatomi were force-removed from Twin Lakes to Osawatomie, Kansas, between 4 September and 4 November 1838, a march of about 660 miles in 61 days; the carriers of the march vary on its dead — forty and forty-two both print in the compilations — and the figures stand as carried, unmerged. The death itself stands on a nearer record. The Trail of Death letters of Benjamin Marie Petit, who accompanied the removal (Indiana Historical Society, 1941, read first-hand), carry a letter of Henry Willmering, S.J., dated 9 June 1938, identifying the chief in the parish register of St. Mary's Church at Sugar Creek, Kansas: Chief Menominee is probably the Alexis Menominee of that register, who died on 15 April 1841, aged about fifty, and was buried in the Sugar Creek cemetery. Sugar Creek was the mission of the removal years, 1838 to 1848. One conflict prints whole here and is recorded in this lane's accounting as NEW-A-1: later summaries, the chief's encyclopedia entry among them, print that he died at "St. Marys, Kansas" and was "buried at St. Mary's Mission, Kansas" — but the St. Marys town mission dates from the mission's move in 1848, seven years after his death, and the two printings are not merged: the register tradition says Sugar Creek, the later summaries say St. Marys, and both stand. Indiana's own memorial beat closes the article at the strength one carrier gives it: the state erected the Menominee statue near Twin Lakes in 1909, on a legislative grant of $2,500 as that carrier prints it. The settler named for this row, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and Menominee record, is reached here through the Petit letters and the register tradition they carry; nothing in the reached record ties the chief's own village to Lakeville's ground, and none is claimed — his beat belongs to this build because the cession and removal that emptied this ground were his refusal and his march.