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Before 1832
At the start of the treaty era the townsite and all the country around it stood in Indian title. The valley of the St. Joseph and its tributary Potato Creek was Potawatomi country — the nation whose chiefs treat with the United States in every instrument that touches this county — and the ground itself was unsurveyed, unentered, and unceded, lying south of the line run in 1817 from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, in the watershed of Potato Creek, a stream whose valley the tribes section treats as the record carries it. No reserve had been laid on the townsite, no village on it is named in any record, and no grant had carved it out: when the cessions begin, this ground passes whole, once, by a single instrument. The instruments are taken in their order below, and the one that took the ground is printed first.