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EVERY CESSION TOUCHING THIS GROUND, IN ORDER
The series opens with the instrument that did not take it: at Chicago on 29 August 1821 the Potawatomi ceded some five million acres of Michigan country — and Indiana's St. Joseph valley stood untouched in Potawatomi title when it was done. The treaty of the Mississinewa, 16 October 1826 (7 Stat. 295), took Maumee-side land, a ten-mile strip along Lake Michigan, and the Michigan Road grant; this valley it left untouched. At St. Joseph on 19 September 1827 (7 Stat. 305) the United States consolidated Michigan's scattered reserved tracts into the single Nottawaseppi reserve — Michigan ground, printed because it shows the method a year early, on the same river, before the same commissioners' world turned to Indiana.
The instrument of 1828: at the missionary establishments on the St. Joseph — Carey Mission — on 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317), Lewis Cass and Pierre Menard took for the United States the Michigan side in the first article and northern Indiana in the second, proclaimed 7 January 1829. The second article's calls run from the line run in 1827 due east from Lake Michigan's southern extreme, at the point due south of the head of the most easterly branch of the Kankakee — the portage headwaters are a boundary call inside the instrument — south ten miles, then by the corners of the reservations at Flat Belly's and Seek's villages and the lines of former cessions to the Ohio line. The Granger ground north of the river lay inside those calls, and the Granger leg prints the treaty as that ground's taking, whole. Whether the townsite sections of Penn Township — south of the river, some six to seven miles below the state line as the town's coordinates fix it — fell inside the 1828 calls or were taken by the cascade that followed is a question the record reached does not answer in so many words, and it is printed here as an open question rather than settled by arithmetic: the candidate instruments stand named, and the settler is the treaty text's calls plotted against the federal township survey, a determination the Maps and Land legs are charged to make. A third position stands in the county's own historian and is printed beside the question, unharmonised: Howard's land-title chapter divides the county into quarters and dates the extinguishment of Indian title in its northeast quarter to the treaty of Chicago itself, 29 August 1821 — with the southeast quarter following on 28 September 1828 and the southwest last, on 26 October 1832 (Howard, pp. 154–155). The treaty readings dug for this project's South Bend and Granger legs confine the 1821 cession, as it touched this valley, to Michigan ground; Howard's framework, written from the county's own records, gives the county's eastern side an 1821 extinguishment. Both stand as printed; the 1821 instrument's own boundary text (7 Stat. 218), plotted on the survey, is the settler of this question too.
The cascade of 1832: what the 1828 instrument left in Indiana, the Tippecanoe treaties took. In October 1832, in three instruments on the Tippecanoe, the Potawatomi bands ceded the country remaining to them in Indiana — the valley's south side among it, if it had survived 1828 — carving out the individual and group reserves whose own cessions followed in 1834 and 1836. The treaty of Chicago, 26 September 1833, took the Michigan side's remainder and carried, in its supplemental article, the exception the next article states. The Yellow River treaty of 5 August 1836 took the Twin Lakes reserve in Marshall County, one county south — the sale whose enforcement became the removal of 1838. Against that cascade the settlement dates of this ground stand in visible tension, printed unreconciled: the settlement record puts the first settlers on this ground in 1828 — 1829 on the town's page — and a sawmill on the creek by 1831–32 — arrivals ahead of the October 1832 instruments, in the same posture as settlement across the valley's south side, where occupation ran ahead of the last cessions and the entries followed the survey. Which instrument's name belongs on the townsite's title is the open question stated above; that the ground passed out of Potawatomi title in this cascade — by 1832 at the latest, and on Howard's framework as early as 1821 — is the series' sum.