The exception that held: Pokagon's band

THE ONE BAND OF THIS RIVER THAT WAS NEVER REMOVED

One band of this valley negotiated the right to remain, and its mechanism is a matter of instruments, not sentiment: Leopold Pokagon (about 1775–1841), who succeeded Topenebee as the valley's principal chief on Topenebee's death in 1826, led the Catholic Potawatomi whose affiliation the record dates to 1830 — and dates two ways, printed whole: Buechner's account has Fr. John Frederic Reze baptise Pokagon with twelve others in July 1830; the Pokagon scholarship has Fr. Stephen Badin arrive in August 1830 to raise the mission Pokagon had requested, with the baptism in 1833. At Chicago in 1833 Pokagon held out, and Commissioner George B. Porter added the supplementary article of 27 September 1833 allowing the band to remain in Michigan — the ground of the permission stated in the negotiation itself, in Secunda's reading: they might stay "on account of their religious creed." The 1994 Senate Report states the result in one sentence: "the Pokagon Band is the only Potawatomi Band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan and receive their share of prior treaty payments in Michigan." Pokagon then made the right ground, buying 874 acres on Silver Creek in Cass County, Michigan, in fee simple — Clifton's figure — with treaty money and the proceeds of family-reservation sales: private title, not a reserve, which is why the removal machinery could not reach it. In the removal drive of 1840–41 the exception was tested and held: General Hugh Brady, superintendent of the emigration, honored Associate Justice Epaphroditus Ransom's written opinion that the band had a right to remain. Pokagon died on his ground on 8 July 1841. The band's federal standing, restored by Public Law 103-323, signed 21 September 1994, names it in the act's findings the descendant and political successor of the signatories of eleven treaties, from Greenville in 1795 through Chicago in 1833 — the 1828 cession in this ground's cascade ninth among them. This township's share of the exception is the share of the whole valley: the band's ground lay across the state line and downriver, never in Penn — and it is the reason a Potawatomi nation still stands on this river at all.