# N05_E18 Great Lakes pilot: 1832–2026 Potawatomi treaty and hydrologic crosswalk **Research date:** 2026-08-09 UTC **Sector:** `N05_E18` **Canonical geometry:** 24 latitude bands × 24 longitude bands = 576 sectors; the cell spans 37.5°–45.0° N and 75°–90° W. This note does not redefine the cell. **Pilot position:** Great Lakes nine-sector octagon centered on the N05_E18 working anchor at Merrillville, Indiana. **Selected next unresolved path:** The prior 2026-08-09 note identified primary treaty, land-cession, removal, and Indigenous-authored/community-controlled evidence as the next gap. This run follows that path without repeating the 1882 county-history extraction or the earlier NLDI result. It adds the National Archives' digitized treaty catalog links and two distinct Archive.org historical works for a bounded corroboration crosswalk. The treaty catalog metadata were accessible; the treaty-object pages themselves rendered as a JavaScript shell in this run, so treaty article/page text was not independently extracted. ## Research question What can be documented, with explicit source limits, about the 1828–1836 Potawatomi land-cession, reservation, and removal sequence relevant to the Lake Michigan–Kankakee–Calumet corridor, and what can be aligned with the existing modern N05_E18 hydrologic crosswalk without turning treaty geography into a cell-wide score? ## Search envelope - **Sector and anchor:** `N05_E18`; Merrillville, Indiana, approximately 41.4828° N, 87.3327° W. - **Historical place names and features:** Lake Michigan, Calumet, Kankakee, Chicago, St. Joseph, Tippecanoe River, Yellow River, Turkey Creek, Fort Dearborn, Bailly, Pokagon, Potawatomi/Pottawatomie, Prairie, Wabash, Elkhart, Coldwater. - **Target bands:** `1500-1800`, `1800-1950`. - **Target variables:** historical institutional profile; land-tenure and boundary transition; Indigenous settlement and transport context; removal chronology; water/route connectivity. - **Modern bridge retained from prior note:** USGS NLDI position/reach/catchment and linked-site discovery at the Merrillville anchor. This run does not treat it as a historical measurement. ## Raw observations ### A. National Archives treaty catalog: authoritative catalog-level record The National Archives page states that the series **“Ratified Indian Treaties, 1722–1869”** (National Archives Identifier `299798`) has been digitized in full and made available through the National Archives Catalog. Its catalog-links table lists the following relevant records: | Date | Treaty/catalog entry | National Archives identifier | Record type available in this run | |---|---|---:|---| | 1828-09-20 | Potawatomi at Mission upon the St. Joseph, Michigan Territory | `122643087` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1829-07-29 | United Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi of the waters of the Illinois, Milwaukee, and Manitoouck Rivers at Prairie du Chien, Michigan Territory | `170826601` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1832-10-20 | Potawatomi of the Prairie and Kankakee at Camp Tippecanoe, Indiana | `146290832` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1832-10-26 | Potawatomi (Wabash and Elkhart Bands) at Tippecanoe River, Indiana | `146756261` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1832-10-27 | Potawatomi (St. Joseph, Cold Water, Wabash, and Elkhart Bands) at Tippecanoe River, Indiana | `146925340` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1833-09-26 | United Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi at Chicago, Illinois | `155390860` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1834-12-04 | Potawatomi (Comoza’s Band) at Lake Maxeeniekuekee, Indiana | `124450593` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1834-12-10 | Potawatomi (Muck Rose’s Band) at Tippecanoe River, Indiana | `124450598` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1836-03-26 | Potawatomi (Mesquawbuck’s Band) at Turkey Creek Prairie, Indiana | `148017343` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1836-08-05 | Potawatomi at Near Yellow River, Indiana | `12013177` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1836-09-20 to 1836-09-23 | Potawatomi bands at Chippewanaung, Indiana | `148026068`, `148026435`, `148026533` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | | 1846-06-05/06-17 | Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi at agency near Council Bluffs / Potawatomi Creek | `175516208` | Catalog link and title/date/party metadata | These entries are observations about the National Archives' cataloged treaty series and record titles. They do not, by themselves, establish the treaty articles, acreage, payments, signatories, reservation boundaries, or compliance history. ### B. Archive.org regional history metadata and treaty/removal passages #### B1. Al Stone, *The Pottawatomis: history and folklore of the Indians of Kankakeeland* (1960) Archive.org metadata identify the item as `pottawatomishist00ston`, created by Al Stone and the Mark Twain School (Kankakee, Illinois), dated 1960, 54 scanned images, sponsored/contributed by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The OCR is available as `pottawatomishist00ston_djvu.txt`; the item is a retrospective regional history rather than a treaty record. The OCR around printed pp. 26–31 reports, in the book’s own later narration: - treaty entries for St. Joseph (1828), Prairie du Chien (1829), First Treaty of Chicago (1832), Tippecanoe (1832), and Second Treaty of Chicago (1833); - reservation descriptions associated with named Potawatomi families and villages in the Kankakee region; - a statement that the last great Indian council in the local area was in 1830, that removal to the west occurred in the 1830s, and that the 1836 movement was directed toward Council Bluffs; - a description of local villages, trails, fishing, hunting, and river-valley residence. The item’s pp. 26–31 are page-level OCR locations for this bounded extraction. The language includes period stereotypes and romanticized or generalized claims about “the Indian”; those phrases are not accepted as neutral observations. The treaty acreage and payment figures are retained below as **reported by this secondary regional history**, not as independently verified treaty facts. #### B2. Otho Winger, *The Potawatomi Indians* (1939) Archive.org metadata identify the item as `potawatomiindian00wing`, created by Otho Winger (1877–1946), published by the Elgin Press in 1939, with 170 scanned images and a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign contribution. The OCR is available as `potawatomiindian00wing_djvu.txt`. Page-level OCR locations provide a partially independent regional history account: - printed pp. 34–38 describe the 1821 Chicago cession, 1826 Michigan Road agreement, 1828 Carey Mission treaty, 1829 Prairie du Chien and 1832 Camp Tippecanoe cessions, and 1833 Chicago treaty; - printed pp. 56–61 describe the Great Sauk Trail, the Chicago–Detroit route, the Calumet region as a hunting/camping ground, a village at the place later called Merrillville, trails connecting the area to Kankakee, Chicago, the St. Joseph, and the Tippecanoe, and the Kankakee as a water route with a short portage to the St. Joseph/Lake Michigan system; - printed pp. 36–39 describe the 1830s removal sequence and western destinations, while preserving the author’s historical framing rather than treating it as an official administrative record. Winger’s statement that an important village stood at the site later called Merrillville is a geographically relevant lead, but it is a local-history claim whose underlying archaeological and primary documentary support remains to be checked. It is not converted into a population, settlement-density, or infrastructure value. ### C. Modern USGS hydrologic bridge retained from prior run The prior N05_E18 note recorded a machine-readable USGS NLDI crosswalk for the Merrillville anchor: - query point: `POINT(-87.3327 41.4828)`; - returned `comid`: `3399712`; - hydrolocation reachcode: `04040001000480`; - NLDI basin: one local catchment polygon associated with that COMID; - linked WQP/NWIS discovery: nearby point sites including `USGS-04092975`, `USGS-04092977`, `USGS-04093000`, `USGS-04093200`, and related WQP identifiers. This modern network result is included only as a bridge target. It does not prove that the historical trails and water routes had the same geometry, discharge, institutional control, or environmental condition. ## Source interpretation 1. The National Archives catalog establishes that a documentary treaty series exists and identifies a dated sequence of relevant Potawatomi records from St. Joseph and Prairie du Chien through Tippecanoe, Chicago, Turkey Creek, Yellow River, Chippewanaung, and Council Bluffs. This is a high-confidence catalog observation, not treaty-content extraction. 2. The two Archive.org books converge on a broad historical sequence: land-cession and reservation activity in the 1820s–1830s, routes and settlements organized through trails and rivers, and removal pressure or movement westward in the 1830s. They are secondary histories with different dates and authors, not independent primary treaty instruments. 3. Winger’s 1939 account is the strongest new geographic lead for the working anchor because it explicitly places a village at the later Merrillville location and describes trails through the Calumet–Kankakee–Chicago–St. Joseph system. The claim remains qualitative and requires archaeological, tribal-government, treaty-reserve, or primary administrative corroboration. 4. The treaty catalog sequence suggests that N05_E18’s historical institutional profile cannot be represented only as “transport access” or “industrial potential.” Treaty-making, reserved parcels, land transfer, and removal are institutional boundary events that altered access and settlement conditions. This is an interpretation, not a quantified causal estimate. 5. The modern NLDI reach/catchment and the historical route descriptions converge only on the existence of water-linked and overland connectivity at different times and scales. They are related, not directly comparable. ## Derived observations (not scores) ### D1 — Dated institutional sequence ```text 1828-09-20: St. Joseph treaty appears in the National Archives catalog 1829-07-29: Prairie du Chien treaty for Illinois/Milwaukee/Manitoouck waters appears in the catalog 1832-10-20 to 1832-10-27: Camp Tippecanoe and Tippecanoe River Potawatomi records appear 1833-09-26: Chicago treaty record appears 1834-12-04 to 1834-12-10: Indiana band records appear for Lake Maxeeniekuekee and Tippecanoe River 1836-03-26 to 1836-09-23: Turkey Creek, Yellow River, and Chippewanaung records appear 1846-06-05/06-17: Council Bluffs-area record appears ``` This is a catalog chronology, not a claim that the events alone describe all Indigenous political life or that each record maps inside N05_E18. ### D2 — Historical route crosswalk | Source observation | Spatial footprint | Relation to `N05_E18` | Comparability to NLDI | |---|---|---|---| | Winger, pp. 56–61: Calumet, Merrillville, Chicago, Kankakee, St. Joseph, Tippecanoe trails and water routes | Multi-county regional network | Includes the working anchor and crosses the fixed cell/neighbor system | Related but not equivalent | | Stone, pp. 26–31: Kankakee villages, reservations, river valley, removal | Kankakee regional corridor, largely south/east of anchor | Connected neighboring corridor; not a cell-wide record | Qualitative only | | National Archives treaty titles, 1828–1846 | Treaty-specific parties and meeting places | Cross-boundary institutional record; exact treaty footprints require article/map review | Not comparable without text and boundary extraction | | NLDI `comid 3399712` and reach `04040001000480` | Point-to-reach/local catchment | Small modern subarea inside fixed cell | Machine-readable network geometry only | ### D3 — Reported treaty figures retained without adoption as facts Stone’s 1960 account reports acreage and payment figures for several treaties, including figures for the 1832 Tippecanoe and 1833 Chicago entries. Because the digitized treaty text was not extracted and the regional account is secondary, those figures are **not promoted into the project’s raw authoritative dataset**. They remain leads for the next retrieval step. No acreage, payment, population, reservation area, route length, or removal count is derived from them. ### D4 — No score derived No area-weighted water value, transport density, population estimate, Indigenous population value, energy measure, constraint score, adaptive-capacity score, or `provisional_quadrant` is derived from this run. The records have mixed source footprints, qualitative content, and incomplete primary-text access. ## Model classification ```yaml provisional_quadrant: unresolved classification_status: not_assigned reason: treaty-object text and boundary extraction are incomplete; Archive.org histories are secondary and geographically broader than the fixed cell; modern NLDI geometry is not historically equivalent; primary Indigenous/community-controlled corroboration remains missing confidence: unresolved_for_quadrant ``` `provisional_quadrant` is a model output and is intentionally not treated as an archival fact. ## Confidence and missingness - **National Archives treaty-series existence and catalog titles/dates/parties:** high for catalog metadata; no treaty-article claims made. - **Archive.org item identity and metadata:** high; item identifiers, dates, creators, scan extents, and OCR derivatives are recorded. - **Winger historical route and Merrillville-village statements:** medium-to-low; page-located OCR from a 1939 secondary history, with no archaeological or primary corroboration in this run. - **Stone treaty/reservation/removal statements:** medium-to-low; page-located OCR from a 1960 regional history, with retrospective and pedagogical framing. - **Historical geographic fit:** low-to-medium; routes and treaty meeting places cross the fixed cell and Great Lakes octagon. - **Modern NLDI bridge:** high for the returned API observations, low for historical comparability. Missingness codes: - `treaty_text_not_extracted`: National Archives object pages rendered as a JavaScript shell during this run; treaty articles, signatures, maps, and page references remain to be retrieved. - `treaty_boundary_not_crosswalked`: no treaty parcel or cession geometry was assigned to the fixed cell. - `primary_indigenous_record_missing`: no Indigenous-authored, tribal-government, or community-controlled source was located and verified in this bounded run. - `archaeological_corroboration_missing`: the Merrillville-village claim has not been matched to a site report or archaeological dataset. - `secondary_source_bias`: both Archive.org histories use retrospective framing; period stereotypes and romanticized language are not treated as observations. - `geographic_match_uncertain`: source corridors, treaty meeting places, NLDI catchments, and the fixed 24 × 24 cell are different units. - `historical_measure_not_available`: no continuous 1828–1836 population, transport volume, discharge, or land-use series was obtained. - `archival_silence_not_zero`: unavailable treaty text or unlocated corroboration is not interpreted as absence. ## Falsification and alternative explanations A later village at or near Merrillville may reflect a local settlement, seasonal camp, or retrospective place association rather than a dense permanent population. Trail persistence may reflect terrain, water crossings, colonial road construction, or later highway selection rather than a uniquely Potawatomi transport system. Treaty chronology may document federal land acquisition and administrative process without proving that treaty terms were understood, accepted, or implemented uniformly. Industrial concentration later in the region may be explained by capital, rail/port engineering, labor, political jurisdiction, and corporate strategy as well as by water and mineral geography. A valid future comparison should test N05_E18 against the other Great Lakes octagon cells using the same treaty-text extraction, boundary crosswalk, hydrologic network variables, and missingness rules. ## Unresolved gaps and next search path 1. Retrieve the digitized treaty page images or PDF objects for National Archives identifiers `122643087`, `170826601`, `146290832`, `146756261`, `146925340`, and `155390860`; extract article-level cession, reservation, annuity, boundary, and removal language with page/image numbers. 2. Resolve the National Archives catalog-object access issue without treating the catalog title as treaty text; preserve an explicit retrieval failure if the object remains inaccessible. 3. Search Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Nottawaseppi Huron Band, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and relevant tribal archives or cultural-resource pages for community-authored histories, place-based knowledge, and source-attributed treaty interpretation. 4. Locate archaeological or state historic-preservation records for the alleged Merrillville/McGwinn’s Village site and the Calumet–Kankakee route network. 5. Crosswalk treaty cession/reservation polygons, historical trail lines, NLDI reaches/catchments, and the fixed `N05_E18` geometry before deriving any infrastructure or institutional variable. 6. Continue the separate WQP/USGS `nwisin.01.02200882` discrepancy investigation; this run does not correct or overwrite the reported `674 mg/L` row. 7. Keep `provisional_quadrant` unresolved until comparable raw-observation tables, explicit formula version, alternative explanations, and matched-sector checks exist. ## Provenance register 1. **National Archives, American Indian Treaties: Catalog Links.** The page states that the digitized series “Ratified Indian Treaties, 1722–1869” is National Archives Identifier `299798` and lists the treaty records and identifiers above. 2. **National Archives catalog record: Potawatomi at Mission upon the St. Joseph, 1828.** Catalog identifier `122643087`; catalog page was a JavaScript shell in this run and treaty content was not extracted. 3. **National Archives catalog record: United Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi at Prairie du Chien, 1829.** Catalog identifier `170826601`; treaty content not extracted. 4. **National Archives catalog record: Potawatomi of the Prairie and Kankakee at Camp Tippecanoe, 1832.** Catalog identifier `146290832`; treaty content not extracted. 5. **National Archives catalog record: Potawatomi at Tippecanoe River, 1832.** Catalog identifiers `146756261` and `146925340`; treaty content not extracted. and 6. **National Archives catalog record: United Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi at Chicago, 1833.** Catalog identifier `155390860`; treaty content not extracted. 7. **Stone, Al, *The Pottawatomis: history and folklore of the Indians of Kankakeeland*.** Archive.org identifier `pottawatomishist00ston`; dated 1960; creator Al Stone / Mark Twain School; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign contribution; OCR file and scanned pages, especially printed pp. 26–31. and 8. **Winger, Otho, *The Potawatomi Indians*.** Archive.org identifier `potawatomiindian00wing`; dated 1939; creator Otho Winger; Elgin Press; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign contribution; OCR file, especially printed pp. 34–39 and 56–61. and 9. **USGS NLDI position/hydrolocation/basin/linked-site crosswalk.** Retained from the prior N05_E18 note; query point `POINT(-87.3327 41.4828)`, `comid 3399712`, reachcode `04040001000480`. , , and 10. **Fixed geometry and research procedure.** `08-research-sop.md` and `ghojualamanchu/sectors/N05_E18_MERRILLVILLE.json` define the 24 × 24 grid and evidence rules. ## Record limits This is a bounded N05_E18 research result. It adds a National Archives treaty-catalog sequence and two page-located Archive.org secondary histories covering 1828–1846 treaty/removal context and Calumet–Kankakee–Merrillville route claims. It does not extract treaty articles, treaty maps, Indigenous-authored/community-controlled evidence, archaeological corroboration, a cell-wide historical value, a derived score, or a `provisional_quadrant`. Catalog access limitations and secondary-source bias remain explicit. No secrets or private data are included.