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 175 in the modern treaty index — and its first article's calls, plotted, enclose the townsite deep inside. The boundary runs: from Lake Michigan at the Indiana–Illinois line, with the lake's margin to the southern boundary of the 1826 Wabash cession; east to the northwest corner of the 1828 St. Joseph's cession; then south ten miles; then with the Indian boundary line to the Michigan Road; south with the road to the 1826 cession's northern boundary line; west with the Indian boundary line to the Tippecanoe River; and with the 1818 St. Mary's boundary line to the Illinois line, and north to the beginning. The polygon's southern boundary at this longitude runs roughly along the ten-miles-south line and the boundary lines below it — seven to thirteen miles south of the townsite at every point. Walkerton, at 41.466 degrees north, is not near an edge of this cession; it is in its interior, ceded with the whole southwest quarter of the county in the single instrument that emptied the Indiana Potawatomi country west of the Michigan Road. The survey followed within two years, the land office opened the ground, and the first settler was on it by the fall of 1835 — the sequence The Land and the Story of Walkerton section carry from here. The year itself is part of the instrument's context, and Chapman's narrative prints it: 1832 was the year of the Black Hawk War, whose panic ran through this county in his telling, and the Miami and Potawatomi did not join the hostiles — the cessions of that October were not a war's spoils but a negotiation's, concluded at the Tippecanoe council ground in the war's immediate aftermath, with the removal clock written into the country they emptied.