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1821 — 1843 · THE SPINE'S OWN CASCADE BEAT
The cascade: The ground passed out of Potawatomi title in a series of instruments, and the Story of Mishawaka section prints the series whole. The Treaty of Chicago, 29 August 1821, ceded some five million acres of Michigan country and left Indiana's St. Joseph valley in Potawatomi title. The Treaty of the Mississinewa, 16 October 1826, took Maumee-side and lake-strip land and granted the Michigan Road; this valley it likewise left untouched. The Treaty of St. Joseph, 19 September 1827, gathered scattered Michigan reserves into the ninety-nine-section Nottawaseppi reserve. The taking of this ground is the Treaty of St. Joseph of 20 September 1828, concluded at Carey Mission by present Niles: its second article ceded the northern Indiana country inside which the Mishawaka townsite lies — in the Indian Claims Commission's later accounting, Indiana Area 146 — for a permanent annuity of two thousand dollars, a further thousand a year for twenty years, thirty thousand dollars in goods and the labourer, blacksmith and education provisions the text enumerates. The treaty knows no Mishawaka village and no Mishawaka signature: the village at the rapids had emptied about 1820, and its ground was signed away as part of a valley, by the valley's chiefs, at a mission upriver. The Tippecanoe treaties of October 1832 ceded most of what remained in Indiana and carved the last reserves, among them the reservation at Pokagon's village, expressly reserved from the cession. The Treaty of Chicago, 26 September 1833, took some five million acres in Illinois and Wisconsin and bound the United Nation to removal west within three years; its supplementary articles of 27 September took the Nottawaseppi reserve and the forty-nine-section Topenebee and Pokagon villages tract opposite Niles, down to the Indiana line and no farther — and carried the supplemental article that let Pokagon's band remain in Michigan. This townsite is not in the 1833 instruments at all; its title had passed in 1828.
The principal chiefs' deaths: The valley's principal chief through the first instruments was Topenebee, principal chief of the St. Joseph Potawatomi, whose name runs through the treaties from the 1790s to his death in 1826 — he died the year of the Mississinewa treaty, before the instrument that took this ground was negotiated, and the 1828 cession was made by the valley under his successor. Leopold Pokagon, who succeeded him, held the band that stayed together through the cascade and died on 8 July 1841, with his people still on their ground, his right to remain vindicated the year before by a Michigan supreme court justice's opinion that the Army honoured.
The removal: Removal came to the valley in two operations, and neither began on this ground. The forced march the Potawatomi remember as the Trail of Death began at Twin Lakes in present Marshall County, one county south, where Menominee's band held its 1832 reserve and maintained the later cession of it was forged: Tipton's militia surrounded the village at the end of August 1838, the rolls recorded 859 people, and on 4 September 1838 the column set out, 660 miles in sixty-one days to the Osage River country in Kansas; the standard accounts count forty-two dead on the road, twenty-eight of them children, and 756 arriving. The march's route ran south and west from Twin Lakes; it did not pass the rapids. This ground's own removal was the quieter Indiana operation of 1840–43, run under the treaty provisions of 1834 and 1836 — General Hugh Brady superintendent of emigration, the valley's own trader Alexis Coquillard conducting — of which Chapman's county history gives the whole in one sentence: the Potawatomi "were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard." The destination word is Chapman's; the caravan record of the 1840 parties puts Coquillard's people crossing the Mississippi at Quincy toward the Kansas reservations, and both statements stand together, unharmonised. How many of the removed came from Mishawaka's own ground no narrative source reached says; the muster rolls would, and the Story of Mishawaka section prints the gap rather than a share of a county total. One band was not removed at all: Pokagon's, whose negotiated right to stay is the valley's standing exception, carried whole in the tribes leg.
Sources:
- The tribes fragment of this build, from the treaty texts (7 Stat. 295, 305, 317, 431, 442) — the cascade instrument by instrument as it touches this ground, the 1828 consideration itemised, the reserve test, and the removal's course 1838–1843, with Chapman's sentence quoted entire and the Iowa/Kansas statements printed unharmonised.
- Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the 1821 treaty's five million acres as the city history compresses the series, printed in the tribes leg as his compression.
- The tribes fragment, from the Pokagon Band's published record and the 1994 restoration report (Public Law 103-323) — Topenebee's death in 1826 and Pokagon's succession; Pokagon's death on 8 July 1841; the band's negotiated right to remain.