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16 October 1826 – 27 September 1833 — the cessions that reached this valley
1826 — what Mississinewa did and did not take: The treaty line for this ground opens at the mouth of the Mississinewa on 16 October 1826 (7 Stat. 295), where Cass, Ray and Tipton took two Potawatomi cessions and a road. Precision matters here, because the 1826 treaty is often mis-summarized as the sale of northern Indiana. Its first cession was a Wabash-and-Maumee tract — up the St. Joseph's of the Miami, Fort Wayne's river, to the Ohio line — and a ten-mile strip along Lake Michigan's southern shore east to the Chicago cession line: the Calumet strip, not the St. Joseph valley. Its second article ceded the Michigan Road: a hundred-foot strip from Lake Michigan to the Wabash, with a section of land for every mile — the grant that built the road through this valley's western edge, past the portage, and made the carrying place's successor a public work. The valley of the St. Joseph of Lake Michigan itself the 1826 treaty neither took nor needed to take: the bend's ground had passed out of Potawatomi title five years before, at Chicago in 1821 (7 Stat. 218), east of the segment that bounded the Chicago cession and north of the line run in 1817. What the 1826 treaty met in this valley was that cession's western edge, and the road its second article granted across ceded ground. The valley ground that still stood in Indian title after 1826 — this county's land south of the 1817 line — would be taken two years later, at a mission on the river; the townsite had not waited for it.
1828 — the treaty on the river: On 20 September 1828, "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey Mission, by present Niles — Lewis Cass and Pierre Menard took the cession this section exists to record (7 Stat. 317). Its first article took the Michigan side: from the river's mouth up the St. Joseph to a point between two named villages, then to the state line and the lake. Its second took northern Indiana: beginning on the line run in 1817 due east from the lake's southern extreme, at the point due south of the head of the Kankakee's most easterly branch — the portage's own headwaters are a boundary call in the instrument — running south ten miles, then by the corners of the Miami reservations at Flatbelly's and Seek's villages and the lines of former cessions to the Ohio line. In the Indian Claims Commission's later accounting these are Michigan Area 145 and Indiana Area 146. Measured against its own calls, the second cession does not reach the South Bend ground: its band runs ten miles south from the line run in 1817, and the townsite stands four miles and better north of that line, at the bend. What the second cession took in this county was the county's ground south of the 1817 line, for a permanent annuity of $2,000, a further $1,000 for twenty years, $30,000 in goods and the labourers, blacksmith, tobacco, iron and education money the articles itemize — the consideration the second article names for both of the treaty's cessions. The townsite's Indian title was extinguished seven years earlier, at Chicago on 29 August 1821 (7 Stat. 218), inside the cession bounded on the west by the line run due south from the St. Joseph's south bank near Parc aux Vaches and on the south by the same 1817 line this instrument begins from — the attribution the county history of 1907 prints for the county's northeast quarter. The third article granted individual tracts, located on the second cession, to named persons "all of whom are Indians by descent" — the reserve system in miniature, whose remnants the next instruments cleared.
1832 and 1833 — the clearing of the remainder: What 1828 left in Indiana was reserves: the individual grants, and the band reserves the Tippecanoe treaties of October 1832 (7 Stat. 378 and companions) created and then, in the same instruments' logic, scheduled for cession — among them the Twin Lakes reserve of Menominee's Yellow River band in present Marshall County, whose refusal becomes the removal entry below. The last instrument of the series is the Treaty of Chicago, 26 September 1833 (7 Stat. 431), in which the United Nation of Chippewa, Ottawa and Potawatomi ceded some five million acres in Illinois and Wisconsin and agreed to removal west within three years — and its supplementary articles of the next day, 27 September (7 Stat. 442), which took from the Michigan-side chiefs the Notawasepe reserve, the ninety-nine sections of the 1827 St. Joseph treaty, and "the tract of land on the Saint Joseph River, opposite the town of Niles, and extending to the line of the State of Indiana, on which the villages of Topenebee and Pokagon are situated, supposed to contain about 49 sections" — and made those chiefs parties to the Chicago treaty for $100,000. Inside those supplementary articles sits the exception the next entry is built on: the provision that let one band stay.
Sources: Treaty with the Potawatomi, 16 October 1826, Articles 1–2, 7 Stat. 295 (text read via the Statutes at Large); "The Indians and the Michigan Road," Indiana Magazine of History 83 (1987) — the 1826 cessions' geography and the road grant's career; Treaty with the Potawatomi, 20 September 1828, Articles 1 and 3, 7 Stat. 317 (text read via Kappler / Oklahoma State treaty record); Indian Claims Commission, 27 Ind. Cl. Comm. 187 — Areas 145 and 146 and the 1828 consideration; Supplementary Articles, 27 September 1833, 7 Stat. 442 (text as printed in the 1874 memorial of the Michigan and Indiana Potawatomi, House Mis. Doc. No. 5, 43d Congress).