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1826–1835
The individual-reserve test for Olive Township is positive, and its center is the townsite itself. The sixth article of the Treaty of 1826 and the schedule of grants annexed to it (the schedule text at 7 Stat. 299) grant, in the instrument's words, "To each of the following persons, Indians by birth, and who are now, or have been, scholars in the Carey Mission School, on the St. Joseph's, under the direction of the Rev. Isaac M'Coy, one quarter section of land, to be located under the direction of the President of the United States" — fifty-eight scholars in all, among them Joseph Bourissa, Mark Bourissa, Jude Bourissa, Achan Bourissa, and Lazarus Bourissa, the name spelled as the treaty prints it: B-o-u-r-i-s-s-a. The instrument states quantity — one quarter section, 160 acres — and no location; location was reserved to Presidential direction after survey, and the sixth article restrains each grant: it "shall never be conveyed… without the consent of the President." The selections, when they came, were made in the fall of 1829 by Johnston Lykins, and the federal tract books place a dense block of them in this very township — in Township 38 North, Range 1 West: Joseph Bourissa, northwest quarter of section 35; Mark Bourissa, northwest quarter of section 26; Jude Bourissa, southwest quarter of section 23; Achan Bourissa, southeast quarter of section 27; Peter Moose, northeast quarter of section 35; Betsey Ash, northwest quarter of section 33; Susanna Isaacs, northeast quarter of section 33; Topenibe, southwest quarter of section 33 — and Lazarus Bourissa, the northeast quarter of section 34: the exact quarter-section on which, six years later, the plat of New Carlisle was laid. The extinguishment sequence needs no separate instrument and none was found: these were individual grants, alienable with Presidential consent, and their designed disposition was sale. The design itself carries a conflict that prints whole. The reserve catalogue compiled from the federal records (Wyckoff, "Potawatomi Reservations in Indiana and Illinois, 1818–1832," 2020, from the General Land Office tract books) reports McCoy's purpose plainly: the scholar grants were procured not as homes — "the intent was to sell these reserves to provide funds for their new mission in Kansas. These students probably never saw these lands" — with McCoy estimating the sales at $13,000. Against that stands the local tradition, in Howard, Chapman, Woolman's cabin, and the town's historical marker, of Lazarus Bourissa as the resident Native landowner of the ground, whose children sold to Carlisle. Both print. On the grant's purpose the federal-record account is the stronger evidence, and this build does not state as fact that Lazarus lived on the quarter-section; what Howard and Chapman carry — purchase from the children, after the father's death, in 1835 — is the conveyance the tradition and the plat agree on. Its consideration and exact deed date were not reached: the settler is the St. Joseph County deed record for the Bourissa-to-Carlisle conveyance. The other reserve families tested on or near this ground all test negative: the Bertrand reserves of 1821, 1826, and 1828 stand at Parc aux Vaches in Michigan, on Portage Prairie in Range 2 East, and on the 1828 second cession in northeastern Indiana; Ashkum's band reservation under the treaty of 27 October 1832 was surveyed in Miami County, townships 28 and 29 north, range 4 east, some sixty miles southeast, and ceded in 1836; the 1828 and 1832 individual grants stand on their own cessions, none in Olive Township.