The Odawa lived in the Lowell area when white settlers arrived, and they would have identified themselves as Anishinabe, meaning the first people or the original people. In a heavily forested land rich with animals including bear, wolves, deer, mink, otter, beaver, coyote, and skunk, the rivers served as highways for canoe travel, supplemented by footpaths about 18 inches wide. The Flat River Odawa lived seasonally and moved at least three times a year: in summer, bands of as many as 400 people lived in Segwun in the Lowell area on the south bank of the Grand River and farmed where the fairgrounds are now; from October through January, smaller family groups moved up the Flat River to hunting and trapping camps; and from February to April, families lived at maple sugar camps, each tapping 800 to 1500 trees. A series of treaties displaced the local Odawa to make room for new settlers. Cobmoosa, known as The Great Walker, was a Headman present at the signing of these treaties and helped local tribes gain permission to move to reservations in northern Michigan instead of being sent to Oklahoma. In 1778 the British Governor of Detroit called on the Odawa of the Grand River to help stop General George Rogers Clark's advance through Illinois during the American Revolution, but local people refused. In 1807 Tecumseh tried to unite the tribes, and local people again refused. The Treaty of 1821 opened land south of the Grand River to settlement, a smallpox epidemic in 1835 killed one-third of the Native population along the Grand River, and the Treaty of Washington in 1836 opened land north of the Grand River to settlement. In 1850 the Michigan Constitution granted Native Americans citizenship and the right to vote if they renounced tribal affiliation. The Treaty of 1855 ended the threat of removal from Michigan and established reservations in Mason and Oceana Counties, with five years to choose land. In 1857 the Lowell area Odawa left for Oceana County in the Pentwater area, Hooker closed the trading post, and in 1862 Cobmoosa also left Lowell for Oceana County. Segonse, or Rodney Negake, was born in Cobmoosa's Lowell village in 1847, baptized Rodney Lewis Negake after Rodney and Lewis Robinson, and moved at age 10 with the whole band to the reservation in Oceana County. Their wagonogans were domed houses made from red willow frames covered with birch bark, and there were three Odawa summer village locations in the area, each associated with a different time period and identified by a chief's name, although village headmen were not absolute bosses because Ottawa political power moved from the bottom up.