Big Miami Reserveeeee

Big Miami Reserve & Seven-Mile Strip

Draft for Wikipedia

Bill Robinson

Oct 2013

Seven-Mile Strip

The seven-mile strip was the last vestige of Native Sovereignty in Indiana.

The name refers to the East-West dimension of the parcel the Miami 'ceded' to the Federal Government in 1838.

The tribe was given five years to leave, or be subject to forceful Removal under President Andrew Jackson's law clearing all natives from East of the Mississippi.

It was then given to the state to pay for the construction of a canal.

It's northern limit was the Wabash river and the southern border was 34 miles below that.

It was a remnant (or just West) of the 760,000 acre Big Miami Reserve. (Killmore's [Flo?] Creek can be seen in the lower-left part of the map below. The Swamp Creek tributary's watershed became the source for the later BsC community. Most of the larger Reserve came to be called Howard County, but it also included adjacent parts of Wabash, Miami, Cass, Clinton, Tipton, Madison and Grant Counties.

Among other considerations, there were annual payments made to the tribe in Oklahoma (& Kansas?), mills built and three prominent Miami leaders received personal property.

Apparently a few settlers had purchased lots before this treaty, although this fact might not appear in the land records due to the massive backload in the Vincennes office.

Before non-native settlement, there was only trails through the woods, buffalo grass and swamp...

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Article by Historian, Carl Leiter

"THE BIG MIAMI RESERVE...

was set aside in 1818 at St. Mary's, Ohio, in the same treaty by which the Miami Indians gave up their claim to the New Purchase area south of the Wabash River.

The Miami Reserve contained some 760,000 acres and was the largest Indian reservation ever to exist within the State of Indiana. By treaty provisions, this reserve extended along the Wabash River from the mouth of the Salamonie River to the mouth of Eel River North in Wabash and Cass counties...

Lines were then struck a smiliar distance south of those two points, and a southern line joining these east and west boundary lines passed near the present site of Tipton, Indiana. The Big Miami Reserve contained all of present-day Howard County, and portions of seven surrounding counties: Wabash, Miami, Cass, Clinton, Tipton, Madison and Grant. [See Map # 1 below {above}].

In July, 1819, deputy surveyors Joseph S. Allen and Henry P. Benton were instructed to survey the Big Miami Reserve. The survey party left Fort Recovery, Ohio, in the fall of 1819, and made its way into the Big Miami Reserve by following the meanders of the Mississinewa River to the Wabash River, encountering Miami Indian towns on the way. The largest of these in north central Indiana was located at the confluence of the Mississinewa and Wabash rivers and was named "Missinewa Town" on the Surveyors' plat of the region. [See Map # 2 of "Missinewa Town" below]...

According to the surveyors' records, "Here the Indians held another council on the 6th of November, 1819, which was much against me...

November 9, 1819, and the Indians now detained the surveyors another two days...

At about eleven miles south of Logansport near Deer Creek the surveyors again encountered a party of dissatisfied Indians...

"Here the Indians, in an imperious manner told me I was going wrong, and said I should go no farther that way, saying that I was going to go to their town and if I would not go 10 miles east of the town they would not let me go on."

The Indians complained that the surveyors were not following the provisions of the St. Mary's Treaty, as the east boundary was not located far enough east to include a Salt Spring they were supposed to receive. The best maps of the time were quite inaccurate and Surveyor Allen realized he could not fulfill his assignment...

On March 18, 1820, the surveyors had returned to the place where they'd stopped over three months before, and finished running the east boundary to the Wabash on March 20, 1820. At the time of the survey of the Big Miami Reserve in 1819-1820, the area was an unbroken wilderness, and there was not a white settlement between Terre Haute and Fort Wayne on the Wabash River. [See Map # 3 below]

For Additional Indiana Territory Information - Click here"

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Bill Robinson - Research Archive

Monday, December 23, 2013

Big Miami Reserveeeee

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