Removal

1833 — 1838 · AND 21 SEPTEMBER 1994

The town's first decade was also the decade the valley was emptied: After the Treaty of Chicago, the federal removal policy fell on the Potawatomi of northern Indiana band by band. Most were persuaded or pressed west in the middle 1830s. The end of it, for Indiana, is the march the record names the Trail of Death. Chief Menominee, whose band held a reservation at Twin Lakes, south of this county near Plymouth, had refused to sign the Treaty of Yellow River in 1836 and did not accept that any treaty had taken his land. The refusal was answered with soldiers: between August 30 and September 3, 1838, General John Tipton's volunteer militia — a hundred men — surrounded the Twin Lakes village, burned the crops and destroyed the village behind them, and on September 4 marched the band out under armed guard.

The chiefs, Menominee among them, rode in a wagon as prisoners. Father Benjamin Petit, the band's missionary priest, marched west with his people. The march ran some 660 miles over 61 days, through Illinois and Missouri to the Osage River at present-day Osawatomie, Kansas, where it ended on November 4, 1838. Of the 859 who set out, 42 died on the road, 28 of them children; Father Petit, broken by the journey, died at St. Louis the following February. It was the single largest Indian removal in Indiana's history. The march did not pass through South Bend — it struck southwest from Twin Lakes — but it belongs in this record because it is the event that emptied the valley the town had been platted in, and because its memory is kept, in markers and in the band's own telling, to this day. (The Pokagon Band's account of the removals speaks of about 500 people and a death toll of one in ten; the march's own documented tally is the 859 and 42 given here, and the two tellings are carried as the record holds them.)

The story does not end in Kansas. In 1994 Indiana, Illinois and Kansas declared the Trail of Death a Regional Historic Trail (Missouri followed in 1996) — and 1994 was also the year the valley's other removal story turned. The Pokagon Band, which had negotiated the right to remain, held on in the valley through a century and a half of legal erasure, and on September 21, 1994 — a date the tribe keeps as its Sovereignty Day — an act of Congress signed by President Clinton reaffirmed its federal recognition, restoring its status as a sovereign nation. The act names St. Joseph County, Indiana, within the band's service area. The descendants of the people who invited Badin to the lakes were, in law again, a government of the valley their mission stood in — a fact that matters to the last entries of this spine, where the band returns to South Bend as a landholder.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau — the Trail of Death marker and history series: the roundup at Twin Lakes and the march to Kansas.
2. Potawatomi Trail of Death references, including the text of U.S. Senate Resolution 499 (116th Congress) — 859 people marched from Twin Lakes on September 4, 1838, about 660 miles in 61 days to Osawatomie, Kansas, with 42 deaths, 28 of them children; Menominee's refusal of the 1836 Treaty of Yellow River; Tipton's militia; Father Petit's march; and the 1994 Regional Historic Trail declarations.
3. Pokagon Band of Potawatomi — the band's own account of the 1838 forced removal (about 500 involved, one in ten dying) and of the band's continuous presence in the region.
4. Public Law 103-323 (1994) — the reaffirmation of federal recognition, signed September 21, 1994, with St. Joseph County, Indiana, named in the band's service area.
5. before-the-city section, this record — the treaty councils and the removal era in full.