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· 234 · C H A P T E R T W E N T Y  The White Man Takes Away What He Bought of the Indians  T here were no legal battles over the remaining four sections of land in the original Smith Reservation on the south side of the Flint River as set aside under the terms of the 1819 treaty. These went to the heirs of a woman named Catharine Mene (Kitchegeequa); Phyllis Beaufait (Petabonequa), the daughter of Colonel Louis Beaufait, longtime U.S. Indian agent and interpreter; a man named John Fisher, or alternately, Jean Visger (Checbalk); and Francis Edouard Campau (Nowokeshik), the son of Barney Campau. Each of these persons was described in the historical record as offspring of white men and Indian women. Nor does it appear there were lawsuits over the other two sections on the north side of the river claimed by Jacob Smith’s daughters Maria Stockton and Harriet Garland. The final section in the Smith Reservation was Section 1—the only reservation on the north side of the river not claimed by Jacob Smith’s heirs. Earmarked in the 1819 treaty for an individual named Tawcumegoqua, it was also at the center of a long lawsuit. This case boiled down to whether the intended Tawcumegoqua was the part-Indian daughter of fur trader Bolieu (the man who reportedly first brought Jacob Smith to the Flint River), or a full-blooded Chippewa of the same · 235 · The White Man Takes Away name, the daughter of the chief named Mixenene. Mixenene, some witnesses said, had been advised by Smith at the treaty councils with Lewis Cass. The land claim of Bolieu’s daughter, which passed to her children with the last names of Coutant and Chauvin, was eventually sold to Joseph Campau of Detroit, uncle of Louis Campau. A daughter of the “mixed blood” Tawcumegoqua, Angelique Chauvin, testified in Wayne County in 1857 that two Saginaw Valley Indian leaders had come to see her mother before the treaty councils were held in the fall of 1819, advising her to attend. “The chief they call Grand Blanc & also Kishcauco [sic] came & asked her to go [to the Saginaw treaty council to get a reservation of land],” she said. “Both these chiefs were relatives of my mother.” On the other side of this case was the full-blooded Chippewa woman who said she was the real Tawcumegoqua; she reportedly sold her interest in the section, which ultimately came into the possession of business partners named George Dewey and Rufus Hamilton. By the time this case ended in their favor after trial in the state Supreme Court, the Civil War was under way. That land earmarked for Tawcumegoqua turned out to be the one contested section in the Smith Reservation where the courts of white men determined it had been intended to go to a full-blooded Chippewa individual. Of course, by the time the case was over Tawcumegoqua and her husband had long since sold their interest to white men. Tawcumegoqua, who had been a child at the time of the Treaty of Saginaw, died in 1848. She was then around 35 years old. One of the witnesses at the trial in the Tawcumegoqua case, held in Saginaw, was a Chippewa man named Naugunnee, who said he was a grandson of Neome. Naugunnee testified that even as a child at the treaty, he had not expected his people to fare well as they agreed to land cessions in the talks with Governor Cass. Naugunnee also said it was Jacob Smith who’d advised Neome to get special reservations for his (Neome’s) children. “When the children came into the council room I was standing [by the] side of Neome; Gen. Cass was nearby,” Naugunnee testified. “I stood so near Neome because I had by past experience learned that the white man generally takes away what he bought of the Indians, and I was anxious to see what this would lead to.” Land sales and development, towns and farms, sprawled west from the Detroit area along the routes to Chicago in the years after Jacob Smith’s death. By this point Lewis Cass, considered one of the nation’s leading experts on Indians, changed his mind about them; he had previously thought that they could and would learn how to farm as did white men, that they must become “civilized.” But now he wrote that · 236 · c h a p t e r t w e n t y...

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