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1838–1843 — told at exactly this ground's tie to it
The Trail of Death — another county's ground: The forced march the Potawatomi remember as the Trail of Death did not begin here, and this section will not borrow it. It began at Twin Lakes, in present Marshall County — one county south, in the Yellow River country — where Menominee's band held a reserve that had come out of the 1832 treaty settlement and which Menominee maintained the later instruments could not take: his written protest of 4 November 1837 charges that his signature to the Yellow River treaty of 5 August 1836 was forged and his name omitted while others who did not represent the tribe were added. The deadline in that disputed treaty passed on 5 August 1838. Governor David Wallace authorized General John Tipton to remove the band by force; on 29–30 August Tipton's hundred volunteer militia surrounded the Twin Lakes village, and the registration rolls recorded 859 people.
On 4 September 1838 the march began — 660 miles to the Osage River country at present Osawatomie, Kansas, sixty-one days — with the three chiefs riding first in a wagon under guard until Father Benjamin Marie Petit, the young French priest of the Twin Lakes mission who had hurried after his parishioners and joined the column at Danville, Illinois, pledged his word for them. Judge William Polke conducted the column west of Danville. Forty-two of the 859 died on the road, twenty-eight of them children; 756 arrived, the rest having escaped along the way. Petit, who had been placed in charge of the sick, died of the journey's effects at St. Louis on 10 February 1839, aged twenty-seven. Jacob Piatt Dunn named the march in True Indian Stories (1909); it was the single largest Indian removal in Indiana.
This ground's tie to it is exact and is threefold, and no larger: it was the removal of this valley's nation, from the county adjoining this one, under the same treaty system this section has traced; its missionary thread runs through this city — Petit's predecessor at Twin Lakes, Father Louis Deseille, driven from the mission under protest, died at South Bend on 26 September 1837, and Petit himself served the Pokagon Potawatomi of this valley from November 1837 until the march; and its lesson was not lost on the valley: the Miami, negotiating their own removal in the years after, knew, in the Indiana Magazine of History's phrase, "the abrupt manner in which Menominee's band of Potawatomi were conducted west," and bargained accordingly.
This ground's own removal — 1840: The valley emptied by contract, not by militia. The Indiana removal of 1840 was a separate operation from Michigan's, run under the treaty provisions of 1834 and 1836 on its own appropriation — General Samuel Milroy first in charge, then General Hugh Brady as superintendent of emigration — and the conductor's contract went to the valley's own trader: Alexis Coquillard, who spent May 1840 reporting to Brady that British agents in Canada were bidding for the Potawatomi — ten dollars a head plus clothing and provisions to remove to Canada instead — and urging that the western emigration begin before the offer took. Chapman's county history (1880) states the outcome in one sentence, and this section quotes it because it is the county's own record of its ground: "they were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard." The destination word is Chapman's; the caravan record of the 1840 parties — one column of about 500 Indiana and Michigan Potawatomi crossing the Mississippi at Quincy that fall, Father Stephen Bernier with them, Abram Burnett, William Burnett's son, interpreting as he had for the 1838 column — puts Coquillard's people on the road across Missouri, toward the Kansas reservations, and the file carries both statements rather than harmonizing them.
How many went from this valley the muster rolls, not the narratives, would say exactly; the rolls survive (they are the basis of Larry Wyckoff's modern compilation), and the narrative sources reached give the 1840 Indiana emigration in the hundreds, gathered over three seasons, with an unknown number escaping the gathering entirely — to Canada, to the Pokagon villages, into the woods. The Pokagon band itself, behind its treaty article and its justice's opinion, stayed. Everyone else's tenure on this ground ended here.
Sources: the Trail of Death record as carried in the Potawatomi Trail of Death Association and Fulton County Historical Society materials and the standard accounts — the Twin Lakes rolls (859), the 4 September 1838 start, the 660 miles and 61 days, the 42 deaths (28 children), the 756 arrivals, Polke's conduct, Petit's Danville pledge and his death 10 February 1839, Dunn's 1909 naming; Menominee's protest of 4 November 1837 as summarized in the Menominee record; the Deseille death at South Bend, 26 September 1837, and Petit's service to the Pokagon Potawatomi, from the Petit record; "Chief Francis LaFontaine and the Miami Emigration from Indiana," Indiana Magazine of History — the Miami knowledge of the Menominee removal; Larry M. Wyckoff, "Removal of the Michigan Potawatomi in 1840" and Potawatomi Removal Muster Rolls 1833–1840 — the separate Indiana operation, the Brady superintendency, Coquillard's contract and his May 1840 Canada report; Chapman (1880) — the 1840–'43 sentence, quoted; the Trail of Death corridor history (Fulton County Historical Society) — the 1840 Quincy crossing, Bernier, and Abram Burnett's interpreting for both columns.