How six townships became the Isabella Reservation

A treaty signed in Detroit on August 2, 1855 drew the lines that still shape Isabella County. In it, the United States agreed to pull all the unsold government land in six townships off the market. That land was held for the Saginaw, Swan Creek, and Black River bands of Chippewa — more than 98,000 acres in the county, set aside for Native families to claim. Those six townships — Isabella, Nottawa, Deerfield, Denver, Wise, and Chippewa, plus the north half of Union — are the bones of the Isabella Indian Reservation.

The 1855 treaty gave each person five years to pick a parcel and ten years before the deed became theirs. A second treaty, signed at the reservation on October 18, 1864, reworked the terms and added more Chippewa to the deal. The government promised the usual help for about ten years: a grist and saw mill at a spot called Indian Mills, a blacksmith shop, schools, and churches.

What came next was a long, painful unwinding. Over the years much of that land slipped out of Native hands through tax sales, fraud, and plain pressure. The homeland on paper and the homeland in fact grew far apart. By 1937 only a fraction was left. That year the Tribe took an option on 410 acres just east of Mount Pleasant and formed a tribal council — the seed of the modern Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan.

The reservation’s lines still wrap much of the county today, including part of the city of Mount Pleasant. These treaties are not distant history here. They are the reason the map looks the way it does.