Is the Harley Clark Mansion on Native American Land?

Well, yes, but let's be a little more specific...

Huge shout-out to the Wilmette Historic Museum for their hard word documenting and answering all my questions and to Peter T. Gayford for his excellent research finding many of these documents. If you find this stuff interesting you should visit and/or donate to them.

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If you live in Evanston, you’re probably tired of hearing about this building: the Harley Clarke Mansion. It’s a 1920s-era mansion on the lake that the City of Evanston acquired in the 1960s and used as an Arts Center until recently. We even voted on it once.

There are currently three proposals to redevelop the property, which the City released last week after I FOIA’ed some emails. I personally don’t care what happens with this property - I don’t live anywhere near it, I don’t think it’s that architecturally interesting, and after a decade, I’m tired of hearing about it.

With that said - I want to address a very specific question that has come up: Do the Native Americans, specifically, the Prairie Band of Potawatomi, have a claim to this property? I recognize that the question itself is loaded but hang on, we’ll get there.

To start - there is a big historic sign in front of the mansion - you can see the lighthouse on the right and the part of the mansion on the left in the background. The treaty line we will discuss bisects the two properties.

This Blog Notes that Antoine was her Husband, not her Father. However her father was Francois Chevallier, so it could be related to him as well?

Treaty of Prairie du Chien (1829) and the Ouilmette Reserve

The Treaty of Prairie du Chien (1829) is the document that technically ceded most of modern day Evanston from the Potawatomi to white settlers.¹ The treaty is an interesting read and there is a digitized version you can read at this URL.

In addition, the treaty granted a parcel of land specifically to Archange Ouilmette, an indigenous woman, the wife of Antoine Ouilmette, a fur trader and settler in the Chicago area. The treaty states;

To Archange Ouilmette, a Potawatamie woman, wife of Antoine Ouilmette, two sections, for herself and her children, on Lake Michigan, south of and adjoining the northern boundary of the cession herein made by the Indians aforesaid to the United States …

The tracts of land herein stipulated to be granted, shall never be leased or conveyed by the grantees, or their heirs, to any persons whatever, without the permission of the President of the United States.

I’ve made a map of the reserve granted to Archange Ouilmette, on a modern day map. It includes present-day Ryan Field, Evanston Hospital, D65’s Orrington Elementary School, Downtown Wilmette, the Baha’i Temple and on the bottom right hand corner - the site of the Harley Clarke Mansion.

The rest of the land (outside of this box) was ceded to the US Federal Government and was distributed or sold to settlers.

After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Federal Government began force-ably removing indigenous people from the area.² In 1838, Ms. Ouilmette and her eight children either voluntarily left or were removed.³

Ms. Ouilmette died in 1840 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation documents the stop during their forced removal to Kansas, where they live today.

During this forced migration west, the Potawatomi made temporary stops in Missouri’s Platte Country in the mid-1830s and the Council Bluffs area of Iowa in the 1840s. The tribe controlled up to five million acres at both locations. After 1846 the tribe moved to present-day Kansas, a new region which was once called the “Great American Desert.”

The exact location of Archange Ouilmette’s grave is unknown.

Evanston Timber Thieves!

Archange Ouilmette never saw her official land grant - it was not formally surveyed until 1842. The survey includes the first official map of the parcel:

Shortly thereafter, by 1844, seven of her heirs (the 8th was a child) petitioned the Federal Government to sell the land. Why sell? A biography of Antoine Ouilmette written in 1908 by the Evanston Historical Society details the necessity - the land was in the process of being pillaged;

That in consequence of their living at a remote distance, the land is deteriorating in value "by having much of its timber, which constitutes its chief worth, cut off and stolen by various individuals living near by," which would seem to indicate that people were not so good in those days in Evanston as they have been reputed to be in some later days, if the Chicago newspapers can be believed in this respect.

By 1846, the parcel was subdivided into sections and sold off. The parcel containing the Harley Clarke land - 640 acres sold for $1,000 to “Norton, Hubbard & Palmer.”

The parcel sales were approved by President Tyler, and later President Grant in 1871 after one of the parcels was not properly signed (not the parcel in question). The new land ownership was detailed in an 1847 Survey. Copies of the paperwork and surveys are in this excellent document put together by researcher Peter Gayford.

1847 Survey of Ouilmette’s Reserve

By 1876, the Reese Map of Evanston shows the land subdivided into lots. Interestingly, the Grosse Point Lighthouse, which was completed in 1873 is not included on this map. But you can see the land where Harley Clarke stands was split into strips coming off the Lake.

From there, the rest is history - due to pollution, lake front property probably wasn’t all that valuable until the canal projects were completed. In 1928, the Harley Clarke Mansion was completed. The property next door - the lighthouse - was federally owned until the 1930s.

Do they have a claim?

This is a thorny issue and I’m not a real estate / indigenous rights lawyer, so I break this into three parts:

• Technical Claim: Do the Potowotomi have a technical claim to the land, like did the President fail to sign any document or is the paperwork incorrect? The answer to this question seems to be: Probably not, it looks like everything was done by the book, including re-papering some of the documents in the 1870s. You can see most of the documents here. The only open question to me on this front is whether the Ouilmette heirs properly hired the legal agent who sold the parcels on their behalf.

  • Furthermore, the land wasn’t a reservation - it was land given to the Ouilmette heirs, not the tribe writ large - so the claims would in theory, flow to individual descendants.

• Moral Claim #1: Given that evidence suggests the Ouilmettes were forced to sell the property due to early Evanston settlers stealing their timber - does the City of Evanston/Wilmette/Northwestern owe a debt to the Ouilmette descendants? I think the answer to this is Yes and at the bare minimum, we (and Northwestern, who is building an $800 million dollar stadium on the land) owes them some form of compensation. ⁴

• Moral Claim #2: Given that the natives were screwed in treaty-after-treaty⁵ as settlers moved west, do we broadly owe a debt beyond 5 minute long land acknowledgements? I think the answer to this is also yes, but I’m just not sure there exist structures for this to happen. This is a bigger question than I can address in a blog (please don’t argue about this point in the comments)

It’s worth noting that over in DeKalb County (Illinois) the Prairie Band recently received a portion of their ancestral land back. So I think there is a moment now that we can work towards some form of re-compensation. I reached out to the Prairie Band but was unable to get a comment.

Anytime there’s an Evanston Roundtable story on Black reparations, there’s a comment guy that asks about the natives.

It’s your moment now, fellow comment guy!

1. Previous to this treaty, the 1816 Indian Boundary Line (now modern day Rogers Ave) was the boundary and the entirety of Evanston was Potowotomi land.

2. There is no doubt in my mind that Andrew Jackson was the worst American President responsible for the most amount of human suffering. I visited the Hermitage once when I was in Nashville and they even whitewashed his slaves as “community members.”

3. It’s not clear on this fact. On one hand, there are stories that she voluntarily went with the rest of the Potowotomi as they were removed. At the same time, the Jackson Administration was force-ably removing natives and I can’t imagine they cared much about some treaty. On the other hand, there are notes that she was very light skinned and white passing - so I have to wonder if it’s actually all of the above?

4. I have no idea how to calculate the present value on this.

5. I suspect after 1830 we stopped filling our end of the 1829 Treaty: “And it is further agreed, to deliver to said Indians, at Chicago, fifty barrels of salt, annually, forever; and further, the United States agree to make permanent, for the use of the said Indians, the blacksmith’s establishment at Chicago.”