Chief Menominee and the Trail of Death

This statue honors Chief Menominee, a Potawatomi leader whose village once stood near these Twin Lakes. In eighteen thirty-eight, when most of his people had agreed to leave Indiana, Menominee refused, insisting he had never signed away his land. State militia rounded up his band anyway. On September fourth, eighteen thirty-eight, some eight hundred fifty-nine Potawatomi were forced to march west at gunpoint.

The route became known as the Trail of Death. It ran roughly six hundred sixty miles, took sixty-one days, and ended on a reservation in what is now Kansas. More than forty people died along the way, many of them children, from heat, thirst, and disease. The monument here was raised by the State of Indiana in nineteen oh nine, and it is often called the first statue in the country erected to a Native American.