Ken asked for a reminder about the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line. Here’s a photo of me by a historical marker that gives a brief explanation. It’s from my September 2006 ride. You probably need to click on the photo to get a version large enough to read.
The marker is in Story, Indiana, just outside of Brown County park. I just now started to make a googlemap about the 2006 bike ride.
The Ten O’Clock treaty line didn’t leave many marks on the landscape in the form of visible property lines or roads, but it left a few. I didn’t realize until just now, after playing with google maps and the satellite view, that there may have been a few that I missed back in 2006. One of those I missed might have been right here near this sign. It looks like a bit of the south boundary of the park may follow the old treaty line. It will be something to check out.
In my last post I wondered if the people who named the town of Winemac (in Pulaski County) knew which Potawatomi leader their town was named for. I’ve since found the following paragraph, on page 510 of the 1883 county history of White and Pulaski counties.
The county seat was named for a distinguished Miami chief known as “Wynemac,” who, in some of the early cession treaties, reserved a tract of land comprising several sections on the Wabash River. It is stated that this chief once had a village in what is now Pulaski County, but the writer has been unable to discover any satisfactory evidence that such was the case.
I haven’t been able to find any mention of a Miami Winemac, much less one who had a reservation along the Wabash, but there is a Winemac who is connected with the history of the Miami people. It’s the pro-American one of the two Potawatomi leaders by that name. He was one of the signatories of the very same 1809 treaty by which the Ten O’Clock line was established.
Now if you know where the Potawatomi people lived, you might wonder what a Potawatomi leader was doing in Fort Wayne, signing away land further south that had never been occupied by Potawatomi people. But that was William Henry Harrison’s way of negotiating treaties. He tended not to be very fastidious about who signed them.
Article 1 of the treaty document, which you can read here, begins as follows:
The Miami and Eel River tribes, and the Delawares and Putawatimies, as their allies, agree to cede to the United States …
Note those words, “as their allies.” Somehow, a few Potawatomi leaders, as supposed “allies” of the Miami, were thereby entitled to sign away the Miami lands for them.
The result of Harrison’s technique was that the treaties he negotiated tended not to settle the matters he thought he had settled. The United States eventually had its way, but it often required future violence and bloodshed.
I’ve blogged about the 1806 Stony Creek encampment of the Shawnee leaders, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh. The two brothers were gaining some adherents to their cause in 1806, but there was a lot of resistance among some of the Native peoples. They didn’t believe the problem of white encroachment was quite as serious as the two brothers made it out to be.
But the 1809 treaty served as a wake up call. It alerted the people that it was just as Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh had predicted — the whites were intent on taking their land by whatever means possible. It was an inadvertent “stimulus package” for their pan-Indian movement. Large numbers of people who had been sitting on the sidelines now thronged to their gathering place and were more willing to accept their leadership.
