The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1838 AND 1840–43, DATED BY COLUMN
The great column did not pass this ground, and is printed as not-here: the Twin Lakes reserve, sold under the Yellow River treaty of 5 August 1836 — a signature Menominee protested on 4 November 1837 had been forged for him — fell due on 5 August 1838. Governor Wallace authorized General John Tipton; the militia surrounded the village; the rolls recorded 859 people. The column set out on 4 September 1838 and walked 660 miles in 61 days to the Osage River country at present Osawatomie, Kansas: 42 dead, 28 of them children; 756 arrived. The Citizen Potawatomi Nation's own account adds that the militia burned the fields and houses as the wagons departed and that the leaders rode shackled in a wagon at the column's head. Fr. Benjamin Marie Petit, who had served the valley's Pokagon Potawatomi from November 1837, followed the column and died at St. Louis on 10 February 1839. Its road ran south through Logansport: it crossed neither the rapids nor this ground, but the people it took were this valley's people, from the reserve one county below. Indiana's own removal, 1840–43, was a separate operation, run under the treaty provisions of 1834 and 1836 — General Samuel Milroy first in charge, then General Hugh Brady as superintendent of emigration — and its conductor's contract went to the valley's own trader, Alexis Coquillard. Chapman's county history closes the story in one sentence, quoted whole here as the sister legs quote it: "they were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard." The destination word is Chapman's; against it stands the caravan record of a column of about 500 Indiana and Michigan Potawatomi crossing the Mississippi at Quincy in the fall of 1840, Abram Burnett interpreting, on the road across Missouri toward Kansas. The two statements are carried unharmonised. By 1843 the valley's south side — this ground among it — stood emptied of the people who had held it, excepting only the band the exception held.