Ten miles north of the southern extreme

Indiana's northern border is where it is because of a lake it does not touch.

The Enabling Act of 1816 set the state's northern boundary at a line drawn through a point ten miles north of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan. William Harris surveyed it the following year.

Ten miles north. That put a strip of what is now Indiana above a line that had already been run as an Indian boundary, and it is the reason the ground under this county was signed away twice.

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The county is sixteen and a half miles deep, and its own organizing act says so.

Beginning at the northeast corner of Elkhart County, thence running east with the northern boundary to the range line between 11 and 12, thence south sixteen and one half miles, thence west to eastern boundary of Elkhart County.

Congressional townships are six miles square. Sixteen and a half miles is two full tiers and a short one, which is why the top tier of this county is cut off by the Michigan line and Lima sits in it.

Ten of those sixteen and a half miles are north of the 1817 line.

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The top ten miles were signed away at Chicago in 1821.

The treaty of the twenty-ninth of August that year, between the United States and the Ottawa, Chippewa and Potawatomi, ceded a tract running south to a line drawn due east from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan. Royce numbers it cession eighteen.

That takes all of Van Buren, Lima and Greenfield, and all but the last half mile of Newbury, Clay, Bloomfield and Springfield.

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The rest was signed away at St Joseph seven years later.

The treaty of the twentieth of September, 1828, with the Potawatomi. Its second clause begins at a point on the line run in 1817, due east from the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, and closes back on that same line. Royce numbers it cession twenty-two.

That takes Johnson, Eden, Clearspring and Milford, and the half mile at the bottom of the middle tier.

So the boundary between the two cessions runs east and west across this county, through the bottom sections of four townships, about half a mile above their southern edge. Nobody here has ever drawn it on a map of this county.

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What the Potawatomi were given for the second cession is written down.

an additional permanent annuity of two thousand dollars; and also an additional annuity of one thousand dollars, for the term of twenty years; goods, to the value of thirty thousand dollars… an additional sum of ten thousand dollars, in goods, and another of five thousand dollars, in specie, shall be paid to them in the year 1829.

Then seven thousand five hundred dollars to be spent under the direction of the President on clearing and fencing land, erecting houses, buying animals and farming tools, and paying labourers to work for them.

Two thousand pounds of tobacco, fifteen hundred weight of iron, and three hundred and fifty pounds of steel, shall be annually delivered to them.

A thousand dollars a year for education, and the treaty says for how long: as long as Congress may think the appropriation may be useful.

And a hundred dollars a year in goods to To-pen-i-be-the, principal chief, during his natural life.

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The treaty also names eighteen people and gives them land.

They are in the third article, and it is explicit about where the grants go: located upon the second cession above described, where the President of the United States may direct, after the country may be surveyed.

Sah-ne-mo-quay. Way-pe-nah-te-mo-quay. Me-no-ka-mick-quay. Ship-pe-shick-quay. Assapo. Moahquay. Me-shaw-ke-to-quay, two sections. Mary Préjean. To-pe-naw-koung. Au-bee-nan-bee, a Potawatomi chief, two sections. Me-che-hee. Kes-he-wa-quay. Benac. Pe-pe-ne-way, a chief. Pierre Le Clair. Betsey Ducharme. Madeleine Bertrand.

And Louison, a Potawatomi, one section, and the treaty says what it is to include.

to include his house and cornfield

Most of the others are women, and the treaty identifies each of them the same way. Sah-ne-mo-quay, wife of Jean B. Dutrist. Moahquay, wife of Richard Chabert. Kes-he-wa-quay, wife of Pierre F. Navarre. They are Potawatomi women married into the French and American trading families, and their grants are the only land in the treaty that goes to anybody by name.

Where any of it was finally laid out is not in the treaty, because the treaty says the President would decide after the survey.

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Eighteen Potawatomi people are named in that document, with land attached to each. This county's two histories, nine hundred pages between them, name none of them, and none of any other.

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This archive has already reported that there is no treaty in this county's record: no cession, no reserve, no acreage, no instrument, no signature, no payment, and the land changing hands in a subordinate clause. Everything above is what was missing from it. Two treaties, a date for each, a line with a survey behind it, a schedule of what was paid, and eighteen people with names.

None of it is in either county book. Both print the organizing act with its sixteen and a half miles and neither says why the county is short at the top, or what the line is, or that there is a line at all. Ford's Indian chapter discusses a reserve in the next county south and two Miami treaties of 1838 and 1840, and says of the Potawatomi only that they sold about six million acres in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, including all their claim in this state.

The treaty that took the southern third of this county is not named in either book.