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As of November 2026 — the chiefs' fortunes are the valley's; this ground's share is stated
The boundary discipline. No reserve ever stood in T37N R3E or R4E (tested negative, Tribes leg), and the townsite's title was extinguished in 1821 on the Tribes leg's telling (Before-the-City carries Howard's 1821 framework against the open plotting question, unharmonised, and this article does not re-litigate it). The fortunes below are therefore the St. Joseph valley's, printed at boundary size, with this ground's share stated plainly at the end: the share is passage and cession, not residence or reserve.
Cash, totaled from the treaty texts. The Treaty of Chicago, August 29, 1821 (7 Stat. 218), which extinguished title here, engaged to pay the Potawatomi nation $5,000 in specie annually for twenty years — $100,000 over the term — plus $1,000 annually for fifteen years expended on a blacksmith and a teacher. The Tippecanoe treaty of October 27, 1832 (7 Stat. 399) engaged $15,000 annually for twelve years — $180,000 over the term — with $32,000 in goods paid at signing (of which $2,700 was applied to horses, leaving $29,300 in merchandise), $10,000 in goods the following spring to the Nottawasipa band, and the band's scheduled just debts of $20,721 paid. These are national and band sums for cessions far larger than this township; they are the published cash frame of the era, printed as treaty engagements, not as any one chief's income.
Land grants, totaled. The 1832 treaty's Article III grants run by the section: to Topenebee, principal chief, one section (640 acres); to Pokagon, second chief, one section (640 acres) — the named individual grants to the valley's two head chiefs total 1,280 acres in that instrument. The Pokagon Band's own course is the era's measurable fortune: by the supplemental articles of September 27, 1833 the band ceded its Michigan reserves of 164 sections (104,960 acres) and joined the main Chicago treaty's cession, and Pokagon then purchased and registered 874 acres in fee simple on Silver Creek, Cass County, Michigan, jointly with his wife — Clifton's figure, funded, on the banked telling, "with treaty money and the proceeds of family-reservation sales." The 874 acres are the one sized, individual, treaty-funded holding in the record reached.
The death-year holding — printed as an absence. Pokagon died July 8, 1841. No published figure for a cash holding at his death appears in the record reached: what followed was litigation among his heirs, the community and the Catholic Church over ownership of the Silver Creek lands — a land dispute, documented; a cash estate, not published. No Chapman or Howard estate notice for any treaty-era figure of this valley appears in the fragments read. The settler for a death-year figure is the reserve-sale and annuity record worked instrument by instrument (Kappler's texts; Royce; Wyckoff) with the Cass County probate file — named here, not filled in. This ground's share of the whole article: the 1821 cession extinguished the title; no chief's fortune was seated, held or probated on the townsite ground itself.
Sources:
- Treaty of Chicago, August 29, 1821, Art. IV (7 Stat. 218; Kappler vol. II); Treaty with the Potawatomi, October 27, 1832, Arts. III–IV (7 Stat. 399).
- House Memorial, 41st Congress (1871), on the Michigan and Indiana Potawatomi annuities (the 1833 supplemental articles; 164 sections; the 5,000,000-acre cession) — a claims document, cited at that strength.
- Clifton, The Prairie People / Before Osceola (874 acres; funding sources); Berthrong review, Indiana Magazine of History (the purchase "with money obtained at the Treaty of Chicago and from the sale of small family reservations").