Pigeon Roost Massacre, 1812

Pigeon Roost State Historic Site in Scott County, Indiana, marks the site of one of the deadliest attacks on settlers during the War of eighteen twelve. On September third, eighteen twelve, a party of Shawnee and Delaware warriors, allied with the British, attacked the small farming settlement here, killing twenty-four people, including women and children. The raid was part of a broader pattern of frontier violence as Native nations resisted American expansion into the old Northwest Territory.

A tall stone obelisk, dedicated in nineteen oh four, stands at the site today. For Indiana, Pigeon Roost was a defining trauma of its early territorial years, the kind of event that hardened settler resolve and deepened hostility toward indigenous peoples for a generation.