Chief Menominee and the Trail of Death
Indiana
The statue you are passing honors Chief Menominee, a Potawatomi leader and religious figure whose village stood at Twin Lakes, just southwest of here. In the eighteen thirties, white settlers pressed for the Potawatomi reservation lands, and Menominee refused to sign away his people's home.
In September of eighteen thirty-eight, soldiers forced roughly eight hundred fifty-nine Potawatomi from this land at gunpoint and marched them six hundred sixty miles to present-day Kansas. The journey took sixty-one days. Forty-two people died along the way, and twenty-eight of them were children. It became known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death.
This seventeen-foot granite figure, raised in nineteen oh nine, is said to be the first monument to a Native American erected under a state legislative act. Menominee survived the march but died in Kansas less than three years later.
