Neglected to mention an extinguishment

(29 August 2011, continued) Two new things I learned about the “Twelve Mile” portion of the  Fort Wayne Treaty of 1809:

1. William Henry Harrison said (paraphrased) “Oops, I forgot to mention it.”
2. This wasn’t the first time Harrison had tried to get this land from the Indians.

A month before the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, William Henry Harrison wrote to the Secretary of War saying he forgot to mention to President Madison that he wanted to get a second chunk of land from the Indians, too.    In a letter he had written to the President, he had proposed to obtain the western-most of the two areas shaded in blue on the above map, the one bounded on the northeast by the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line.    But now he said he wanted to get the eastern-most one, too.

One reason was the awkward shape of the portion of eastern Indiana that had been ceded to the United States by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville (shaded in green on the above map).     He explained as follows:

 In my letter making the proposal for the Treaty which the President has now sanctioned, it appears that I neglected to mention an extinguishment in another quarter which appears to be even more desireable and necessary than that which has been approved.  The County in this Territory, called Dearborn, is perfectly a triangle; its base the Ohio, and its two sides, the lines dividing this Territory from the Ohio, and the Indian boundary (fixed by the Treaty of Greensville), running from the mouth of the Kentucky river to Fort Recovery.  In the neighbourhood of the latter they meet and form an angle so very accute that at the distance of sixty or seventy miles from their junction they are but a few miles apart.   The Country is rich & pretty well filled with settlers, but is nevertheless so extremely narrow as not to admit of a new County being formed out of the upper part of the triangle….  [This is from a transcription on pages 370-371 of Volume 7 of the Territorial Papers]

He also explained that he had wanted to get this chunk of land back in 1805 at the Treaty of Grouseland .  (The area ceded by that treaty is shaded in red.)

The Treaty containing a clause to this effect was actually agreed to and signed by nearly all the chiefs present, but I was obliged to have it expunged for the reasons mentioned in my letter to the Secretary of War of the 16th September 1805.

And what were those reasons he mentioned back then?   This one of Harrison’s letters is online at Google Books:

I’m not quite sure I follow Harrison’s logic here.  The conflict between the Delaware and the Miami was in part because of a misunderstanding about lands between the White River and the Ohio.   Harrison had previously thought he got the Miamis to agree that this land belonged exclusively to the Delaware, while the Miami themselves thought they had just meant they had no problem with the Delaware people using that land.    It’s not the only such point of confusion that ever occurred, and came about in part because Native peoples didn’t have exactly the same concepts of land ownership that the Americans had.    But Harrison seemed to be particularly prone to setting up these misunderstandings.   One such misunderstanding in Illinois country was a factor that contributed to the Black Hawk war 20-some years later.

But even allowing for that, how is it that he thought he could smooth over the misunderstanding by getting the Miami people to give up a huge tract of land in eastern Indiana?   I’m missing something here.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Below are some more photos I took along the treaty line.

This is another photo taken along Boundary Street.   I hadn’t quite left Cambridge City at this point.

Looking south from the same point.

A mile south of the National Road, Boundary Street turns into Paul Road, turning to the left to become square with the world.

The land started to get hillier, too, as it tends to do as one gets closer to the Ohio River.

View larger map

The locations of the photo stops are shown by the three violet markers that lie on an orangish line that shows my route for the day.   The Twelve Mile treaty line is the grayish diagonal line.