The Michigan Road: the treaty strip and the survey

1826–1830 · THE STATE ROAD BEGINS

The road was bought with land before it was built with money: The Michigan Road — the state road from Madison on the Ohio River to Michigan City on Lake Michigan, by way of Indianapolis and South Bend — rests on the treaty cession of 1826, by which the Potawatomi granted a strip one hundred feet wide for the road's path and, to pay for building it, one section of land for every mile of its length; the cession and the land-office machinery it set running are told in this build's Before the City section and are built on here. The road was surveyed in 1829. Its cost, as the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker for the road records, was $242,000, raised from the sale of 170,580 acres of the granted Indian land.

The survey was not a straight line drawn on a map: Joseph Prather's study of the road in the Indiana Magazine of History shows the commissioners choosing the indirect course through the bend of the St. Joseph deliberately, because the direct line north from Logansport ran into the Kankakee swamp — the road as built runs 102 miles from Logansport to the lake against some 72 miles direct, and South Bend stood, in the period phrase, fifty-five miles from the lake by the river and thirty-five by the road. The Potawatomi interest in the location was real and was negotiated: the pilot and interpreter Edward McCartney satisfied the Potawatomi on where the road would run. How long the road is depends on who is counting, and the conflict is printed as it stands: Prather's accounting gives the Madison-to-Michigan City road 265 miles in all; the road's modern advocates give 234 miles. The designations the road wears today descend in a straight line from that survey — state roads 29, 35 and 31 and US 20 in Prather's 1943 mapping, and the Historic Michigan Road byway in ours.

Sources:

1. This build's Before the City section — the Treaty of 1826 (7 Stat. 295), the hundred-foot strip and the section-per-mile land grant, settled there and built on here.
2. Indiana Historical Bureau, Michigan Road marker text and annotation — surveyed 1829, passable by 1834, "completed" in 1837, cost $242,000, built from the sale of 170,580 acres of granted Indian land.
3. Joseph C. Prather, "The Struggle for the Michigan Road," Indiana Magazine of History (1943) — the swamp-driven choice of the route through the bend, the 102-mile Logansport-to-lake course against 72 direct, South Bend at thirty-five road miles from the lake, Edward McCartney's pilotage, and the 1943 designation chain (State Roads 29 and 35, US 31, US 20).
4. The road's modern byway literature — the 234-mile figure for the Michigan Road, printed against Prather's 265 as the standing conflict on the road's length.