The Potawatomi originally lived in the heavily forested northern Great Lakes region with their close relatives the Ojibwe and Ottawa in what is now Michigan, but pressure from the expanding non-Indian population along the eastern seaboard pushed Eastern tribes west into Potawatomi territory, straining relations and food resources and leading the Potawatomi to move south into Wisconsin and Illinois. By the mid-1700s, differences between Native beliefs that land belonged to all living creatures and U.S. laws of property rights and landownership, along with official tribal boundaries and cession treaties, shaped the Potawatomi's destiny. After Native tribes allied with the French in the French and Indian War and later with the British during the American Revolution, the defeat of Native American forces in both conflicts influenced government policy and treatment of Native Americans for the next 150 years. In 1830, the federal government passed the Indian Removal Act, requiring the sale of Native American lands and the emigration of tribes from states east of the Mississippi River to Indian territories in Kansas and Oklahoma, where reservations were supervised by religious denominations that provided schooling, farming training, health care, and religious conversion. Catholic missionary work among the Potawatomi had begun in the 1600s with French Jesuits in Michigan and continued at St. Marys, which was founded in 1848 as St. Marys Catholic Mission to the Pottawatomie and served as headquarters for the 30-square-mile Pottawatomie Reservation established the year before. Father Felix Verrydt chose the site north of the Kansas River despite Potawatomi fears of Pawnee raids and concerns that it was too low and only a mile from the river, and on September 9, 1848, Jesuits and Sisters arrived there. In 1850, Dr. John F. Snyder described the mission as a neat-looking place of church log houses and about twenty small log huts, adding that the Indians had large farms and seemed very industrious. The Potawatomi Indian Agency was established at St. Marys Mission in 1848, and the U.S. government built a one-story, two-room stone Indian Pay Station where annual treaty payments were made to the Potawatomi for lands ceded in the East until the last payment in 1870. The reservation, originally owned by the entire tribe, was later divided into individual allotments distributed to individual owners, splitting the Potawatomi into the Prairie and Citizen bands.