Removal: the dated course, and the band that stayed

1838–1843

The county's own chronology dates the removal and names its conductor. The 1875 atlas: "Various treaties having been made with the Indians by Gen. Cass… they were removed in 1840–43, per order of the General Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard"; its chronological table carries the entry, about 1840, "Indians removed beyond the Mississippi per order of U.S., by [A.] V. Coquillard." Indiana's Potawatomi removal proceeded under the treaties of 1834 and 1836 and a separate appropriation from Michigan's. For this ground the removal is largely beside the title's course: the scholar quarter-sections were individual grants, alienable with Presidential consent and designed for sale, and the townsite quarter had passed to Carlisle in 1835, before the removal period opened. The exception that matters to the St. Joseph valley is the band that stayed, and it is told whole. The treaty of 27 October 1832 reserved land "at Po-ca-gan's village for his band"; the Supplementary Articles of 27 September 1833 then provided that the Catholic Potawatomi band of Leopold Pokagon could avoid removal west if they moved north and settled among the Ottawas at L'Arbre Croche. The Michigan removal clock ran three years from the 1833 treaty's proclamation on 21 February 1835, expiring 21 February 1838. In the 1840 Michigan removal, General Hugh Brady's exempted list of 106 persons in named families included the Pokagon band families and Joseph Bertrand. In the event the band did not settle at L'Arbre Croche — there was no room after the Treaty of Washington in 1836 — and Leopold Pokagon instead bought land in Silver Creek Township, Michigan, with annuity money, and in 1841 obtained Justice Epaphroditus Ransom's written judgment against Brady's attempt to remove them. The qualification prints with the story, because the record requires it: the exemption was band-based — Catholic St. Joseph River Potawatomi acknowledging Pokagon — and personal, not a territorial exemption for Olive Township, which is Indiana ground south of Pokagon's Michigan village. This ground shares the exception, if at all, in the band-membership sense only.