The exception that held

POKAGON'S BAND, AT VALLEY STRENGTH

One body of the valley's Potawatomi was never removed, and its mechanism is part of this ground's record because the same treaty-making that took this ground carved the exception: Leopold Pokagon's band — the Catholic Potawatomi of the St. Joseph valley — held their ground through the exception written for them in the treaty of Chicago of 1833 and the arrangement by which, alone among Indiana's Potawatomi, they removed only across the state line into Michigan, to the Silver Creek country in Cass County, keeping their community, their faith and their chief's succession intact; the band stands today as the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, its federal standing confirmed in the modern era by Public Law 103-323 (1994). The band's full record — the baptism and the mission, the exception's wording, the Dowagiac country succession — is carried at full strength in the South Bend leg, where its ground lies, and is pointed to here, not retold. For this ground the exception's bearing is exact and limited: no Pokagon reserve touched Lincoln Township; the band's villages stood on the river, a day's travel north; and the people Wiley found as his near neighbors in 1834–35 were not Pokagon's — they belonged to the country this section's removal article takes up. The exception is printed because a taking-article that names no exception would misstate how the valley's people met the treaties: one band, by one mechanism, held. It was not on this ground.