The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1836–1841
Test R-1 — the 1838 column's route against Liberty Township: NEGATIVE. Menominee's band was gathered at Twin Lakes after the militia surrounded the village chapel on 30 August 1838; the march began 4 September 1838 with 859 Potawatomi, 286 horses, 26 wagons and an armed escort, the three chiefs riding in a wagon as prisoners. The diary's first week fixes the course: 4 September, 21 miles to Chippeway; 5 September, through Rochester; 6–9 September, to Logansport — every point south and southeast of Twin Lakes, the column moving away from Liberty Township from its first hour, then Battle Ground, then across the state line at Danville, Illinois, on 16 September, reaching the Osage River near present Osawatomie, Kansas, on 4 November 1838, after about 660 miles in 61 days. The death toll prints whole and unmerged (conflict C50): 39 in the enrolling agent's own diary summary (Douglas), 42 in the modern narrative carriers — most of them children. Father Benjamin Marie Petit accompanied his Twin Lakes parishioners on the march. No day's march, camp, or diary entry in the reached route record touches Liberty Township or St. Joseph County; the township's connection to the Trail of Death is that its nearest reserve community was the column's starting point, fifteen miles away. (The reserve had been ceded by the Treaty of Yellow River, 5 August 1836, which Menominee refused to sign and whose signatures he claimed were forged; Menominee survived the march and died at St. Marys, Kansas, 15 April 1841.) Test R-2 — the 1840 removals against this township: NEGATIVE. The 1840 removal was a Michigan operation — Brady's sweep from Detroit to Marshall, the 439 Huron Potawatomi held near Marshall and trekked west from 15 October 1840, Chief Moguago's escape at Skunk Grove and return. No carrier reached places any 1840 gathering, march, camp, or capture in Liberty Township or St. Joseph County, Indiana. Test R-3 — any removal event in Liberty Township: NEGATIVE at the reached record. Chapman's chapter contains none — only the closing general sentence.The band that stayed — the mechanism stated exactly. Leopold Pokagon's band stayed by a provision negotiated into the treaties themselves: the supplemental provision of the September 1833 Chicago treaty allowed the Catholic Potawatomi band to remain if they moved north among the Ottawas at L'Arbre Croche, and the reaffirmation statute states it as a congressional finding — "In the Treaty of Chicago 1833, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians was the only band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan" (25 U.S.C. §1300j(2)). The religious mechanism is documented together in the Band's own and the scholarly accounts: Pokagon sought a priest from 1830, was baptised, abstained from alcohol at the Chicago council, and, "emphasizing the conversion of himself and his followers to Catholicism," secured the amendment. The legal mechanism after the treaty was purchase in fee — and here the record gives two statements, printed side by side unmerged (conflict C75): with treaty monies and proceeds from selling small family reservations, Pokagon bought and registered 874 acres on Silver Creek, in Cass County, Michigan, held jointly with his wife (Clifton, The Pokagons, as summarised in its Indiana Magazine of History review — the review locates Silver Creek "just south of Niles"; the sentence locates the purchase in Cass County near Dowagiac; Silver Creek Township is Cass County ground, and both locators print as the carriers give them); and Wyckoff, citing the federal tract books, records that "Pokagon and Joseph Bertrand purchased close to one thousand acres in what is now Silver Creek Township." The acreages and grantees are not reconciled here; the wife's name at deed strength is a named residue gap (G-BC-6; settler: the deed-level record). In August 1840, Brady exempted thirteen landholding families — 106 individuals, Leopold Po-ka-gon senior's family of 18 first on the list — to remain on their lands until the President's pleasure was known, the measure approved by the Secretary of War; in 1841 Pokagon had to obtain Justice Ransom's assistance again to halt military attempts to remove the Catholic Potawatomi "in violation of the 1833 Treaty." After Pokagon's death on 8 July 1841, disputes among his heirs, the community, and the Church over the Silver Creek lands disrupted the community, and a majority of its residents moved to Brush Creek, Rush Lake, and elsewhere in southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana. The band stayed; the Silver Creek settlement, as a single settlement, did not survive its founder intact. Both halves print.