In Greenville, Ohio, a famous council was held in July 1814, in which the "western" tribes agreed to support the United States against Great Britain. One of the signers was Wabaunsee, an influential Potawatomi war chief who lived on the Kankakee River in Illinois, now Kankakee County, Illinois, about forty miles southwest of Lake Michigan.

Wabaunsee later told Colonel McKenney that he buried the tomahawk forever, in the Indian phrase, on the day he "took the Seventeen Fires by the hand...."

In 1826, he signed the treaty of the Wabash in Indiana, in which he sold the Potawatomi lands to the United States. It was almost a fatal day for Wabaunsee. Whiskey had obviously helped the Indian commissioners persuade the chiefs to sign with the usual disastrous results; Indian turned on Indian and the chief was stabbed. Agent Thomas Tipton, who told McKenney the story, cared for Wabaunsee and he survived.

Ironically, the agent now had a serious problem; the warrior who had stabbed the chief was in hiding, but it was expected that Wabaunsee would seek him out and kill him. Interpreters had warned Tipton that the warrior was popular and his death could bring on a tribal feud.

In the spring when the chief came to the trading post to thank Tipton, the agent begged him to forgive and forget. Wabaunsee grasped Tipton's hand and told him that because he owed him his life, he could "send him [the warrior] and tell him to come back. A man that will run off like a dog with his tail down for fear of death, is not worth killing. I will not hurt him."

In 1828, Governor Lewis Cass arranged a treaty with Wabaunsee and his chiefs on the shores of Lake Michigan. A few days before the formal signing Cass heard that one of the chiefs intended to denounce the treaty unless he was given a bribe.

When Cass told Wabaunsee the chief was indignant.
"An Indian, who will lie, is not worthy to be called a brave. He is not fit to live. If he refuses to sanction what we agreed to in council, I'll cut his heart out."

As Cass later told McKenney, he and his commissioners had a great deal of difficulty in preventing the chief from "putting his threat into execution."

When Black Hawk began his frontier war, the War Department feared Wabaunsee would lead his warriors to the side of the Sauk and Fox chief; instead Wabaunsee joined the border militia. The following year he told his people that they were now surrounded on all sides by the whites and urged them to accept lands beyond the Mississippi offered to them by the United States. The council agreed, and in 1835 Wabaunsee visited Washington to take "his Great Father by hand" and sign a treaty by which his nation agreed to be removed from their ancestral lands to a new home near Council Bluffs on the Missouri.