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Tribes · the marsh's people, and the instrument that took their ground
Before it was a township, this ground was the Potawatomi's hunting country — the western valley of the St. Joseph's people, worked from the river towns for its duck, muskrat, deer, and fish. No treaty names Lincoln Township. So this section does what the baseline demands and what no sister city's verdict can do for it: it plots each candidate instrument's own calls against this ground's fixed position, prints the negatives where the lines do not reach, and names the one instrument whose polygon closes around sections 23 and 24 of Township 35 North, Range 1 West.
The peoples of the valley, in sequence
FIRST IN THE RECORD, AND IN POSSESSION AT THE TAKING
Two different facts, stated as two. The first people the written record names in the St. Joseph–Kankakee country are the Miami — the Myaamia — whose valley record is carried at full strength in this build's South Bend leg. The…
The village test: no named village on this ground
A NEGATIVE, AT THE STRENGTH SEARCHED, WITH THE SEARCH SHOWN
No Potawatomi village is named for Lincoln Township in any record — and the pass looked where villages would be. Chapman 1880, whose township chapters name villages, chiefs, and reserves elsewhere in the county with care, names…
The plotted test, first instrument: Chicago, 1821 — not this ground
7 STAT. 218 — TESTED NEGATIVE ON LATITUDE
The Treaty of Chicago of 29 August 1821 took the St. Joseph valley's north — and stops north of this township. Its first article's calls, read in the treaty text, bound the Indiana cession by a line drawn due east from the…
The plotted test, between the two: the Wabash treaty, 1826 — not this ground
THE NORTHERN BOUNDARY LINE OF THE REMAINING INDIAN COUNTRY
The treaty of 16 October 1826 took the county's northwest quarter and fixed the line the 1832 treaty would start from. This section tests it the way the 1832 instrument itself frames it: the Tippecanoe boundary of 1832 runs, in…
The plotted test, second instrument: Carey Mission, 1828 — not this ground
7 STAT. 317 — TESTED NEGATIVE ON LONGITUDE
The treaty of 20 September 1828 at the Carey Mission took a ten-mile band down the county's east — and ends miles east of this ground. Its first article has two clauses. The first cedes the lakefront tract from the mouth of the…
The taking: Tippecanoe, 26 October 1832
7 STAT. 394 — ROYCE AREA 180 — THE INSTRUMENT WHOSE POLYGON CLOSES HERE
This ground was taken by the Treaty of Tippecanoe, concluded 26 October 1832 (7 Stat. 394). The Indian Claims Commission's findings (27 Ind. Cl. Comm. 187) assign the cession to Royce Area 180 on Royce's Indiana map No. 23 — RIT…
The backstop: 27 October 1832
7 STAT. 399 — ROYCE AREA 181 — PRINTED AS THE BACKSTOP, NOT THE TAKER
A second Tippecanoe instrument, signed the next day, stands behind the first. The treaty of 27 October 1832 (7 Stat. 399; Royce Area 181; RIT 177) cedes in its first article all the Potawatomi title in Indiana, Illinois, and…
The reserve test: no reserve section ever lay here
TESTED TRACT BY TRACT — NEGATIVE
A cession can still leave islands; on this ground it left none. The 26 October treaty's second article reserves, tract by tract: to Aub-be-naub-bee, thirty-six sections at his village — the Twin Lakes country of Marshall County…
Howard's quarters, tested on this ground
THE COUNTY HISTORIAN'S FRAMEWORK, SUSTAINED HERE
Howard divides the county's taking into four quarters, and for this quarter his framework and the plotted test agree. His land-titles chapter (pp. 154–155) assigns the northeast quarter of the county to the treaty of 1821, the…
The removal: the column that did not pass here, and the removal that did
1837–1843 — THIS GROUND'S COURSE AT ITS TRUE SIZE
No removal column formed in Lincoln Township or crossed it; this ground's removal was the quiet one. Chapman's History of Indiana section, read first-hand, gives the county's frame: in July 1837 Colonel Abel C. Pepper convened…
The exception that held: Pokagon's band
THE BAND THAT WAS NEVER REMOVED — POINTER SIZE
One body of the valley's Potawatomi was never removed, and the mechanism is part of this ground's record because the same treaty-making carved it. Leopold Pokagon's band — the Catholic Potawatomi of the St. Joseph valley — held…
The name the river kept: Kankakee
THE READINGS, PRINTED WHOLE
The marsh's river carries the oldest name on this ground, and the readings of it conflict. The linguistic record, in Michael McCafferty's analysis (Names 52:4, 2004; Names 62:2, 2014), is that the name is Miami-Illinois…
The banked Tribes leg ends with the river's name. It names the present-day Pokagon Band and its 1994 standing, but it quotes no modern nation in its own voice about this valley, names no other modern Potawatomi nation with a dated status, and closes without gathering the record's-edge pointers its own articles scatter. This addendum supplies those two closings, at the sizes the published record carries them.
The modern nations' own accounts: this valley, in the Pokagon Band's published voice
The valley's own modern nation describes itself, first, as continuity on this ground — and its published record says so in its own words. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians — Pokégnek Bodéwadmik — opens its official site…
The record's edge: what a fuller record of this ground's first people would require
This section closes where its record closes, and the closing is an inventory: three classes of record, each already pointed to somewhere in the banked files, each named here with what it holds, who holds it, and on what terms it…