Treaty of Saginaw
1819 treaty between the United States and the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples
The Treaty of Saginaw, also known as the Treaty with the Chippewa, was made between Gen. Lewis Cass and Chief Mash Kee Yosh, Chief John Okemos, Chief Wasso and other Native American tribes of the Great Lakes region (principally the Ojibwe, but also the Ottawa and Potawatomi) in what is now the United States, on September 24, 1819, proclaimed by the President of the United States on March 25, 1820, and placed in law as 7 Stat. 203.
Native Americans ceded a large tract of land (more than six million acres (24,000 km2) in the central portion of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The southern boundary of the tract extended from a few miles northeast of Jackson west to just northeast of Kalamazoo. The line then ran directly to the head of the Thunder Bay River in south-central Montmorency County and then along the river to the mouth in Thunder Bay, near Alpena. From there it extended northeast to the international boundary line between the United States and the British Province of Upper Canada and then along the boundary south to the boundary line established by the Treaty of Detroit in 1807, which ran from the shore of Lake Huron in northeast Sanilac County southwest to a point several miles northeast of Lansing and then due south the point of origin. The treaty reserved several smaller tracts of land for Indian use within the ceded territory.
Background
The United States had recently signed the Treaty of Greenville and was looking to further expand. Lewis Cass, territorial governor of Michigan, had sought to bring Euro- American civilization to the territory.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Treaty of Saginaw” as 1819 treaty between the United States and the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 1819 treaty between the United States and the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1572601. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1819, 1820 and 1807.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Treaty of Saginaw” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.