Around then, the state and federal government became eager to open the northern parts of Indiana to settlement and development by European Americans. state, an estimated 2,000 Potawatomi settled along the rivers and lakes north of the Wabash River and south of Lake Michigan. ![]() In 1817, one year after Indiana became a U.S. The Potawatomi subsequently lived in relative peace with their white neighbors. They had become the second-largest Native American tribal group in Indiana.ĭuring the War of 1812, the tribe allied with the British Empire in the hope of expelling American settlers encroaching on their lands. Although the land in what became Indiana was long occupied by the Miami, the Potawatomi were also recognized as traditional owners under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and in subsequent treaties. They moved south from northern Wisconsin and Michigan and historically occupied land from the southern tip of Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, an area encompassing northern Illinois, north central Indiana, and a strip across southern Michigan. The Potawatomi are an Algonquian-speaking people. Many signs are in Illinois, Missouri, and the three Kansas counties. Historic highway signs signal each turn along the way in Indiana in Marshall, Fulton, Cass, Carroll, Tippecanoe, and Warren counties. As of 2013, 80 Trail of Death markers were located along the route in all four states, at every 15 to 20 miles where the group had camped between each day's walk. The Trail of Death was declared a Regional Historic Trail in 1994 by the state legislatures of Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas Missouri passed similar legislation in 1996. Historian Jacob Piatt Dunn is credited for naming "The Trail of Death" in his book, True Indian Stories (1909). There the Potawatomi were placed under the supervision of the local Indian agent (Jesuit) father Christian Hoecken at Saint Mary's Sugar Creek Mission, the true endpoint of the march. Father Benjamin Marie Petit, a Catholic missionary at Twin Lakes, joined his parishioners on their difficult journey from Indiana, across Illinois and Missouri, into Kansas. On August 30, 1838, Tipton's militia surprised the Potawatomi at Twin Lakes, where they surrounded the village and gathered the remaining Potawatomi together for their removal to Kansas. Indiana governor David Wallace authorized General John Tipton to mobilize a local militia of one hundred volunteers to forcibly remove the Potawatomi from the state. It was the single largest Indian removal in Indiana history.Īlthough the Potawatomi had ceded their lands in Indiana to the federal government under a series of treaties made between 18, Chief Menominee and his Yellow River band at Twin Lakes refused to leave, even after the August 5, 1838, treaty deadline for departure. During the journey of approximately 660 miles (1,060 km) over 61 days, more than 40 people died, most of them children. The march began at Twin Lakes, Indiana (Myers Lake and Cook Lake, near Plymouth, Indiana) on November 4, 1838, along the western bank of the Osage River, ending near present-day Osawatomie, Kansas. ![]() The Potawatomi Trail of Death was the forced removal by militia in 1838 of about 859 members of the Potawatomi nation from Indiana to reservation lands in what is now eastern Kansas.
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