The taking, instrument by instrument

THE TREATY CALLS, PLOTTED AGAINST THIS GROUND

This ground was taken late, by one instrument, and the instrument can be tested against the map: Howard's land-titles chapter divides the county into the four 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 treaty of October 26, 1832" (Howard, pp. 154–155). Walkerton stands in the southwest quarter, and this section ran the same instrument-by-instrument test on this ground that the sister passes ran on theirs, plotting each cession's calls against the townsite's fixed position — sections 23 and 24, township 35 north, range 1 west, 41.466 degrees north, 86.48 degrees west — rather than importing any sister city's verdict. The results, instrument by instrument: 1821 — the Chicago treaty's Indiana strip bottoms at the south line of township 37 north, about 41.50 degrees north; the townsite at 41.466 lies south of that line, outside the strip: not this ground's instrument. 1826 — the Wabash treaty took the county's northwest quarter and fixed the northern boundary line of the remaining Indian country; this ground lies south of that line: not taken in 1826. September 1828 — the Carey Mission treaty (7 Stat. 317), signed 20 September 1828 — Howard's "September 28" prints against the instrument's own date, and the variance is flagged here as it stands in his text — took the band along the state line, bottoming some ten miles south of it, about 41.61 degrees north: far north of this ground, not its instrument. 20 October 1832 (7 Stat. 378) — tested because its date is six days from this ground's own: it is the Illinois-side cession, Royce's Area 177 as the Indian Claims Commission record confirms (41 Ind. Cl. Comm. 399): not this ground. 26 October 1832 (7 Stat. 394) — the instrument stands. Its first article's calls run: from Lake Michigan at the Indiana–Illinois line, along the lake to the southern boundary of the 1826 Wabash cession, east to the northwest corner of the 1828 St. Joseph's cession, "south ten miles," then with the Indian boundary line "to the Michigan Road," then "south with said road" to the northern boundary line designated in the 1826 treaty, west with that line to the Tippecanoe River, and so by the 1818 St. Mary's boundary to the Illinois line and north to the beginning (Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. II, reproducing 7 Stat. 394). Plotted: the townsite lies west of the Michigan Road's South Bend–Plymouth course — the road ran at about 86.30 degrees west at this latitude, the townsite at 86.48 — and north of the 1826 northern boundary line; it falls inside the cession on both tests, and Royce's Indiana cession schedule plots the same result, numbering the 26 October 1832 cession Indiana sheet No. 23 (Royce, Indian Land Cessions, Indiana schedule). Howard's southwest-quarter framework is therefore sustained on the instrument's own calls — this ground was ceded on 26 October 1832. The following day's instrument, 27 October 1832 (7 Stat. 399; Royce's Indiana No. 24), the general relinquishment of any remaining Potawatomi claim in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan south of Grand River, closed whatever the day before had left. The treaty's second article reserved, out of the cession, four blocks — and the reservation test prints as clean as the cession test: the 36 sections of Aub-be-naub-bee in Fulton County; the 22 sections of Menominee, No-taw-kah, Muck-kah-tah-mo-way and Pee-pin-oh-waw on the Yellow River in Marshall County; the eight sections of O-kaw-wause, Kee-waw-nay and Nee-bosh; and J. B. Shadernah's single section at Door Prairie in La Porte County. No reservation of the treaty of 26 October 1832 lay in Lincoln Township — the reserves stood one county south and west, and the Yellow River reserve's own later history, its sale under the treaty of 1836 and the removal that followed from it, belongs to the removal article below. The taking of this ground is thus as simple as the county's takings get: one treaty, one date, no reserve inside it — which is precisely why it had to be plotted and not assumed, in a county where the sister ground east was taken eleven years earlier by a different instrument, and where one line in the county record — the supposed "line run in 1817" for the state boundary — has already failed this project's plotting once, in the Granger and Osceola passes, as their legs print. (Royce keeps two numberings for the same instruments: the cession is No. 23 on his Indiana schedule and Area 180 on his map — the Tribes leg prints the map numbers; no figure in either telling changes.)