The taking: the Treaty of Tippecanoe, 26 October 1832

26 October 1832 · 7 Stat. 394 · Royce Area 180

The townsite was ceded by the Potawatomi treaty concluded on Tippecanoe River on 26 October 1832. The instrument — Articles of a treaty made on Tippecanoe River between commissioners Jonathan Jennings, John W. Davis and Marks Crume and the chiefs, headmen and warriors of the Potawatomi, proclaimed 21 January 1833 — cedes, by its first article, the tract "beginning at a point on Lake Michigan, where the line dividing the States of Indiana and Illinois intersects the same; thence with the margin of said Lake, to the intersection of the southern boundary of a cession made by the Pottawatimies, at the treaty of the Wabash, of eighteen hundred and twenty-six; thence east, to the north-west corner of the cession made by the treaty of St. Joseph's, in eighteen hundred and twenty-eight; thence south ten miles; thence with the Indian boundary line to the Michigan road; thence south with said road to the northern boundary line, as designated in the treaty of eighteen hundred and twenty-six…; thence west with the Indian boundary line to the river Tippecanoe; thence with the Indian boundary line, as established by the treaty of eighteen hundred and eighteen, at St. Mary's to the line dividing the States of Indiana and Illinois; and thence north, with the line dividing the said States, to the place of beginning." Read as a polygon, the tract takes in the whole northwest of Indiana south of the 1826 and 1828 cessions and west of the Michigan Road — and the townsite stands inside it on every limb: south of the 1826 cession's southern boundary, west of the ten-mile jog that drops from the 1828 cession's northwest corner, and west of the Michigan Road's course. The mapped test agrees with the calls. The digitized polygons of Royce's cession mapping — the federal dataset built from Charles C. Royce's Schedule of Indian Land Cessions and its maps — return one cession, and only one, for the townsite point (41.532403° N, 86.428041° W): cession 180, this treaty. A control point at Walkerton, whose own taking by this same treaty was settled in that town's build by its own plot, returns 180 as well; two independent plots of two townsites five miles apart land on the same instrument because both stand in the one tract it ceded. The margin is comfortable and is stated in the next article: at the townsite's latitude the mapped western line of the 1828 cession crosses roughly seven miles east of the town, so the verdict is not a boundary dispute. This is Royce's Area 180 — Royce's Indiana pamphlet describes the 26 October 1832 cession, his map's number 23, as lying "in the northwest portion of the State" — and it is the only cession that ever took this ground.