Badin's mission and the band that stayed

1830 — 1833

The oldest institution in South Bend began as a mission to the people about to be dispossessed: In 1830 the Reverend Stephen Badin — the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States — bought 524 acres a mile north of the settlement, around two small lakes, and founded there the mission of St. Mary of the Lakes, Ste. Marie des Lacs, to the Potawatomi. He came at an invitation: Chief Leopold Pokagon, the leader of the Catholic Potawatomi of the valley — a convert, and a man playing a long game for his people's survival — had asked for a priest for his band. Badin built his log chapel among them, and the mission land, the lakes and the name would outlast the mission itself.

Pokagon's strategy became law three years later. The Treaty of Chicago, signed in September 1833, took the Potawatomi's remaining lands across the southern Lake Michigan region — the great cession that opened northern Indiana and Illinois to settlement. Pokagon negotiated a provision in that treaty allowing his Catholic band to remain in Michigan. The federal act that reaffirmed his descendants' standing a century and a half later would state the fact exactly: the Pokagon Band, among the signatories of that treaty, "is the only band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan." The band kept its foothold in the valley — in the southwest corner of Michigan and the borderland of this county — while the cessions and removals of the 1830s emptied the rest. The university that now stands on Badin's mission land gives its own account of the ground in the Notre Dame section of this record.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, institutional history — Badin's 1830 purchase of the 524 acres, the Ste. Marie des Lacs mission to the Potawatomi, and Chief Pokagon's invitation.
2. Public Law 103-323, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Act (September 21, 1994), findings — the 1833 Treaty of Chicago and the Pokagon Band as "the only band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan."
3. Pokagon Band of Potawatomi — the band's own history of Pokagon's treaty strategy and its Catholic mission connection.