1826: the treaty that took the townsite

16 October 1826 · 7 Stat. 295 · Royce Area 133 — POSITIVE

The townsite was taken by the second tract of the first article of the Treaty of 16 October 1826. The treaty, made near the mouth of the Mississinewa, cedes two tracts. Its first tract — Royce Area 132, the Wabash and Fort Wayne polygon running by the Tippecanoe, the Eel River, Seek's village, and the St. Joseph of the Miami to the Ohio line — lies far east and south and does not touch this ground. Its second tract takes it. The decisive call, Article 1's last clause, verbatim: "Beginning at a point upon Lake Michigan, ten miles due north of the southern extreme thereof: running thence, due east, to the land ceded by the Indians to the United States by the treaty of Chicago; thence, south, with the boundary thereof, ten miles; thence, west, to the southern extreme of Lake Michigan; thence, with the shore thereof, to the place of beginning." Plotted, that is a strip ten miles deep along the south end of the lake, running from the state-line latitude east to the 1821 boundary and ten miles south of it — and the town point, at 41.70° north and 86.50° west, falls inside it, just south of its northern edge and west of the 1821 line. Royce's own list of Indiana cessions corroborates the plot in one line: "No. 20. Cession by the last clause of the first article of the Pottawatomie treaty of October 16, 1826; in the northwest corner of the State, and bounded on the map by scarlet lines." The same treaty's second article ceded the road the town would grow on: "a strip of land, commencing at Lake Michigan, and running thence to the Wabash river, one hundred feet wide, for a road, and also, one section of good land contiguous to the said road, for each mile of the same" — the Michigan Road cession, and the road as built left this county on section 34, Township 38 North, Range 1 West, through the townsite section itself. The cession of the ground and the cession of the road through it are one instrument, four years before the road was located and nine before the plat.