The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
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 Potawatomi nation at Lake Ke-waw-nay; in the fall of 1837 a party of eighty to ninety was conducted west of the Mississippi by George Proffit — Ke-waw-nay, Nebash, Nas-waw-kay, and Pash-po-ho among them; and "the regular emigration… about 1,000 in number, took place under Col. Pepper and Gen. Tipton in the summer of 1838." The forced march everyone pictures — the 1838 column from the Twin Lakes reserve, 859 people through Logansport to Kansas, forty-two dying on the road — assembled in Marshall County, one county south, and never touched this ground; it is printed here at that size, as not-here. This ground's emptying came in the general Indiana removals of 1840–43, conducted under Alexis Coquillard — the sentence the county record carries, as the Osceola leg prints it for the county's east — and the chronology is the finding's sharp edge: the cession was signed in October 1832, the surveys ran over the ground by 1834, Fulmer settled in the fall of 1835, and Wiley found his near neighbors still Indian in 1834 or 1835. Settlement and possession overlapped here by the better part of a decade; the ground was ceded on paper a full removal-generation before it was emptied in fact, and the people the first settlers knew as neighbors were living in a country the treaty had already sold beneath them.