Pendleton and the Fall Creek Massacre

Pendleton sits above the falls on Fall Creek where the first non-native settler arrived in eighteen eighteen, and Thomas Pendleton platted the town in eighteen twenty-one. It briefly served as the first seat of Madison County. But Pendleton's most consequential moment came in eighteen twenty-four, when seven white settlers murdered nine Native Americans, two men, three women, and four children, at an encampment near these falls.

What followed was unprecedented. The state of Indiana tried the perpetrators, and four were convicted and sentenced to death. One was hanged that January, and two more were hanged in June of eighteen twenty-five; the fourth was pardoned minutes before his scheduled execution.

It was the first documented case in American history in which white men were executed under United States law for the murder of Native Americans. The trial was covered in newspapers nationwide. Despite its notoriety, it set no lasting precedent for equal justice.