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The Land — Roseland, Indiana
Starting title — whose country this was
The tribes fragment carries the peoples whole; Howard (1907), Chapter II
Title to the Roseland ground begins , as it does for every place in this county sequence, in Indigenous country. The St. Joseph valley at first European contact was Miami country — Howard: when La Salle reached the river in 1679…
The taking — plotted: the Treaty of Chicago, 29 August 1821
7 Stat.
The townsite was ceded by the Treaty of Chicago of 29 August 1821 — Royce Area 117 — the same instrument that takes South Bend, Mishawaka and Granger, and not any of the later instruments that take the county's southern places.…
The margins, measured
The plot's margins South: along the town's own longitude the cession runs unbroken from the town to the mapped 1817 line, where Area 117 gives way to Area 146 at about 41.610° N — the town point stands some 7.4 miles north of the…
The calls check — the one joint the text leaves open
Treaty of Chicago (1821), Art. 1; Treaty with the Potawatomi (1826), Art. 1, second cession
Read from the texts alone The southern limb is closed by the text: the due-east line from Lake Michigan's southern extreme is a latitude the ground clears by miles. The western limb is the joint: the 1821 polygon's western side…
The other instruments — negatives proven from their own texts
Every other candidate is excluded from its own words. 1818: the St. Mary's series holds two instruments — the Potawatomi treaty of 2 October 1818 (7 Stat. 185, Royce Area 98), ceding the Wabash country from the Tippecanoe's mouth…
The reserve test on this ground
Treaty of Chicago (1821), Articles 2 and 3, read whole
No reserve was ever laid on the Roseland ground. The 1821 treaty's own Article 2 reserves five village tracts from the cession — Mang-ach-qua, Mick-ke-saw-be, Na-to-wa-se-pe, Prairie Ronde, and Match-e-be-nash-she-wish at the…
The survey — Township 38 North, Range 2 East
The town lies in Section 23, Township 38 North, Range 2 East , Second Principal Meridian. The derivation, stated so it can be re-run: Indiana's baseline stands at 38°28′20″ N and its meridian at 86°27′21″ W; the township tiers…
Sold as farm land — the land-office frame
The county record at frame strength; the townsite's own entries NOT extracted
Ceded in 1821, the ground entered the federal land system with the rest of the county: Chapman records that the county's lands, "although ceded to the United States Government some years previous," did not come into market until the spring of 1830, the first entries made 19 April 1830, through the district land office at La Porte. The first Clay Township entries were river entries — the 1828–29 settlers of the township frame — and the townsite sections were sold as farm land across the following decades, generations before there was a town to plat.
The ground — glacial course and soils
Howard (1907), Chapters I and VIII; the county frame
Roseland stands on the gravel plain. Howard's physical chapter describes the county's northeastern quarter — Clay Township's country — as "an extensive gravel plain along the St. Joseph river," outwash spread from the Michigan…
Waters — the river's relation, and a creek corrected
Howard (1907), Chapter VIII bounds; USGS record for Juday Creek
The town is a river township's town but not a river town. The St. Joseph River is Clay Township's western boundary in Howard's own bounds for the township, and the river's great south bend — the bend that names South Bend — lies…