Removal — what crossed this ground, and what did not

The removal record as reached; Stuart (1922) and McCord in the Indiana Magazine of History; Chapman (1880)

The documented forced removal did not cross Clay Township. The 1838 removal — the Trail of Death — was Menominee's band: some 859 Potawatomi rounded up at the Twin Lakes reservation in Marshall County and marched from 4 September 1838 by Logansport and down the Wabash to Kansas, arriving 4 November, more than forty dead. Its marked route runs through Marshall, Fulton, Cass, Carroll, Tippecanoe and Warren counties — south from Twin Lakes, never north into this county; St. Joseph County is not among them. A second, later county departure is carried by Chapman: the county's Potawatomi "were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard," settlers recalling farewell visits "on leaving the hunting grounds and graves of their fathers" — Chapman gives no route, and none is borrowed for it here. And one band of this valley did not remove at all. Leopold Pokagon's Catholic Potawatomi of the Bertrand reach stayed: the federal findings in the Pokagon Restoration Act state that in the Treaty of Chicago 1833 "the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians was the only band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan"; Pokagon bought land with treaty monies in Silver Creek Township near Dowagiac; in 1841 a Michigan justice's judgment halted a military attempt to remove the Catholic Potawatomi; and Pokagon died 8 July 1841 in the homeland his band kept. The county frame's removal-exemption course of 1840–41 is consistent with these carriers at the strength stated.