The County's Peoples: St. Joseph County, Indiana

Before the treaties: Myaamia first in the record, Potawatomi in possession

THE VALLEY'S OWN HISTORY, AT COUNTY FRAME

The first history of this ground is the Myaamia people's own, and it begins on this river: in the emergence account the Myaamia Center of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma publishes — the version told by Waapanaakikaapwa (Gabriel Godfroy) to J. P. Dunn in the early 1900s — the people come out of the water at Saakiiweeyonki, "the Confluence," on Saakiiweesiipiwi, the St. Joseph River, and built their first village there. The tribe's publications place the emergence in two wordings, which the South Bend record carries side by side and this section repeats unreconciled, as the tribe gives them: the community history names "the St. Joseph River near South Bend, Indiana" as the emergence river and Saakiiweeyonki as the spot, while other tribal publications describe the place as where the St. Joseph River empties into Lake Michigan. When the written record opens, in December 1679, the ground at the portage — the carrying place between this river and the Kankakee, in the county's southwest — is Miami ground in fact: La Salle's party came up the river to a town of the Miamis near the carrying place, and to this valley's Miami La Salle returned in May 1681 to make his alliance. Across the next century the Miami centre of gravity moved southeast to Kekionga and the Wabash towns, and the St. Joseph valley filled with their Potawatomi kin and allies, until by the treaty century the valley was Bodéwadmi — Potawatomi — country, governed from villages by a line of chiefs the treaty record names: Nanaquiba; his son Topenebee, principal chief of the St. Joseph Potawatomi, whose villages stood opposite present Niles at the state line, his name running through the treaties from the 1790s to his death in 1826; and Leopold Pokagon, who succeeded him. The ground truth the county frame keeps is the South Bend record's own: the county was platted on Potawatomi land, in a Potawatomi valley, within living memory of the villages at the state line.

Sources: South Bend history, before-the-city record (the peoples article) — the Myaamia emergence in both of the tribe's wordings, the Miami town at the portage, the Potawatomi succession, and the Dragoon Trace, citing the Myaamia Center's published history, Costa (2010), the Sabrevois memoir (1718) and Howard (1907).

The taking, at county frame: five instruments, three frameworks, one open town

1821 – 1833 · THE CESSION MAP, PRINTED WHOLE

The county's land passed out of Native title in a cascade of five instruments: the Treaty of Chicago, 29 August 1821 (7 Stat. 218); the treaty of 16 October 1826 (7 Stat. 295); the Treaty of St. Joseph — Carey Mission — 20 September 1828 (7 Stat. 317); the Tippecanoe treaties of October 1832 (7 Stat. 378, 394, 399); and the Treaty of Chicago of 26 September 1833 with its supplementary articles (7 Stat. 431, 442), which took the Michigan side's remainder and carried the Pokagon exception. Which instrument took which square of the county is where the record divides, and the division is printed here in its three frameworks, whole.

The first framework is the plot. The place builds of the county sequence's second wave tested their grounds against Charles C. Royce's Schedule of Indian Land Cessions as carried in the federal Tribal Cession Lands layer, plotted point by point and grid by grid, with control points reproducing each other's verdicts exactly. On that accounting: the northern tier — South Bend, Mishawaka, Granger, Roseland and Indian Village — lies in Royce Area 117, the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, whose southern boundary in Indiana is the line run in 1817 due east from Lake Michigan's southern extreme, the towns standing some seven miles north of it; New Carlisle lies in Area 133, the second tract of the 1826 treaty's first article — a strip ten miles deep along the lake's south end running east to the 1821 line and ten miles south of it, the town point falling just inside; Lakeville lies in Area 146, the Indiana cession of the Treaty of St. Joseph, 1828; and North Liberty and Walkerton lie in Area 180, the Tippecanoe treaty of 26 October 1832 — the only instrument, in North Liberty's testing, that ever took its ground, its 1821 and 1828 attributions both tried and failing. Walkerton's own instrument-by-instrument test, run on the treaty calls against the townsite's fixed position rather than on the layer, reaches the same 1832 result by the calls themselves.

The second framework is the treaty text as the first-wave city builds read it, with the Indian Claims Commission's accounting. The South Bend history's founding record states that the townsite lies inside the second cession of the 1828 treaty — Areas 145 (Michigan) and 146 (Indiana) in the Commission's accounting, 27 Ind. Cl. Comm. 187 — its title "extinguished at Carey Mission in September 1828," for the consideration the articles itemize; and the Granger land record argues the same instrument for its ground whole: the 1828 calls read on the ground, the second cession's band taking Harris Township entire at that longitude, the Claims Commission's Area 146 containing the Mishawaka townsite and this ground with it — concluding, in that section's own words, "title here passed once, in 1828." The Mishawaka record establishes its townsite in Area 146 on the same accounting. These cases stand in the delivered builds unretracted, and against the first framework they conflict on the northern tier: the plot returns 117 for the South Bend and Granger points, the text-and-Commission cases answer 146. The county record merges nothing. The geometry that divides them is statable in one sentence — the 1821 cession's polygon lies wholly north of the line run in 1817, while the 1828 treaty's Indiana calls begin on that line and run south ten miles before turning by the reservation corners to the Ohio line, so that the question is precisely where the plotted polygons and the Commission's plat set the two areas' common boundary through the tier of townships the towns stand in — and the settlers are the ones the builds themselves name: the Indian Claims Commission's plat of Area 146 and the General Land Office tract books, against the Royce Schedule mapping. The practical record is common to both: under either instrument the northern tier's lands came into market in the spring of 1830, and the county's first entries stand on 19 April 1830, as the land section prints.

The third framework is the county's own historian's. Howard's land-title chapter (1907, pp. 154–155), written from the county's own records, divides the county into the quarters of its taking: the northeast quarter by the treaty of 1821, its southern limit the south line of Township 37 North; the northwest quarter by the treaty of 16 October 1826; the southeast quarter by the treaty he dates 28 September 1828; and the southwest quarter by the treaty of 26 October 1832. The Walkerton record flags Howard's "September 28" against the instrument's own date of 20 September and prints the variance as it stands in his text. Howard's map agrees with the plot on the northeast and with everyone on the southwest; it is printed here because it is the framework the county itself was taught from for a century, and because any future settlement of the northern tier has to reckon with all three.

One town's instrument stands open in its own history, and stands open here. Osceola, on the river's south bank in Penn Township, states its question in so many words: whether the townsite sections fell inside the 1828 calls or were taken by the cascade of 1832 that followed — with Howard's framework giving the county's eastern side an 1821 extinguishment as a third position — is not answered in the record reached, its settler named there as the treaty text's calls plotted against the federal township survey. Its settlement record sharpens the question without answering it: the first settlers stand on that ground in 1828, or 1829 on the town's page, with a sawmill on the creek by 1831–32 — arrivals ahead of the October 1832 instruments, in the posture of the valley's whole south side, where occupation ran ahead of the last cessions and the entries followed the survey. That the ground passed out of Potawatomi title in this cascade — by 1832 at the latest — is the Osceola record's sum, and it is this section's sum for the county whole: the taking is certain, dated everywhere within twelve years, and assigned place by place exactly as the place records assign it, conflicts and the one open town included.

Sources: Roseland and Indian Village histories, land records — the plotted verdicts, the six-by-six grids, and the control points (South Bend 117, Granger 117, Lakeville 146, North Liberty 180, Walkerton 180, New Carlisle 133); New Carlisle history, land record — Area 133 plotted from Article 1's last clause, quoted; North Liberty history, land record — Area 180, the 1828 negative tested; Lakeville history, land record — Area 146, the Treaty of St. Joseph of 20 September 1828; South Bend history, before-the-city record — the 1828 case whole, with 27 Ind. Cl. Comm. 187; Granger history, land record — the 1828 case whole, Areas 145 and 146, the reserve test negative; Osceola history, before-the-city record — the taking printed as an open question, Howard's quarters (pp. 154–155), and the settlement dates in tension; Walkerton history, before-the-city record — the instrument test on the calls, and Howard's date variance flagged.

The removal, the exception, and the return

1838 – 2021 · THE COUNTY'S NATIVE RECORD, CLOSED AND REOPENED

The removal of the rest of the valley came in two operations, both stated whole in the South Bend record and anchored here. The Trail of Death began one county south, at Twin Lakes in Marshall County, where Menominee's band held a reserve out of the 1832 settlement: 859 people registered, the march beginning 4 September 1838, 660 miles in sixty-one days to the Osage River country, forty-two dead on the road, twenty-eight of them children, 756 arriving — the single largest Indian removal in Indiana, named by Jacob Piatt Dunn in 1909. This county's tie to it is exact and threefold, as the city record bounds it: it was the removal of this valley's nation from the adjoining county under the same treaty system; its missionary thread runs through South Bend, where Father Louis Deseille died 26 September 1837 and Father Benjamin Marie Petit served this valley's Pokagon Potawatomi from November 1837 until he followed the column and died of the journey at St. Louis on 10 February 1839; and its lesson shaped the Miami's own bargaining after. This valley's own removal was the Indiana operation of 1840–43, run by contract — the conductor's contract going to the valley's own trader, Alexis Coquillard — Chapman stating the outcome in the sentence this history quotes from the county's own record: "they were removed in 1840-'43, per order of the general Government, into Iowa, under the conduct of Alexis Coquillard," the destination word Chapman's, the caravan record putting the 1840 parties across the Mississippi at Quincy toward the Kansas reservations, both statements carried rather than harmonized.

The exception held, and in this county it came home. Leopold Pokagon held out at Chicago in September 1833 for a supplemental article letting his Catholic band remain in Michigan "on account of their religious creed" — the Pokagon Band is, in the 1994 Senate report's words, "the only Potawatomi Band that negotiated a right to remain in Michigan" — defended the right on paper with 874 acres bought in fee on Silver Creek, and won it again in 1840–41 when General Hugh Brady read and honored Associate Justice Epaphroditus Ransom's opinion that the band had a right to remain. Congress restored the band's federal recognition by the Pokagon Restoration Act, Public Law 103-323, signed 21 September 1994; the band today is a sovereign tribal nation headquartered at Dowagiac, Michigan, with more than 4,300 citizens and a ten-county service area reaching into northwest Indiana. And on 28 November 2016 the United States accepted approximately 166 acres in the City of South Bend into trust for the band — the first federally recognized tribal land in Indiana — where on 16 January 2018 the band opened Four Winds South Bend, the first tribal casino in Indiana, under a local agreement paying the city two per cent of net gaming revenue; the state's compact for Class III gaming followed, requested 13 August 2019, agreed January 2021 and signed that May. The tribe frames the 166 acres as the restoration of its ancestral homeland in Indiana; the gaming code's findings frame them as land eligible for gaming under federal law held by a sovereign the state recognizes — the South Bend record prints both framings, and the county record closes its Native section on the fact both framings share: the valley's first nation is present in this county again, in law, on its own ground, a hundred and eighty-three years after the instrument that let it stay.

Sources: South Bend history, before-the-city record — the removal article (the Trail of Death figures, the Deseille and Petit thread, the 1840 Indiana operation, Chapman's sentence) and the Pokagon article (the 1833 exception, the Silver Creek purchase, the Brady–Ransom opinion, Public Law 103-323, Indiana Code § 4-29.5-0.5-2 for the 2016 trust acceptance, the 2018 opening and the 2021 compact).