Pokagon State Park: A Potawatomi Chief's Lasting Name

The state park stretching along Lake James and Lake Snow in Steuben County carries the name of a Potawatomi leader who, in the eighteen thirties, made a calculated and courageous decision: he converted to Catholicism, hoping that his tribe's association with the Roman Catholic Church would protect them from the forced removal that was destroying Native communities across the Great Lakes region.

Leopold Pokagon had risen to lead his band of Potawatomi after the death of Chief Topenebee in eighteen twenty-six. In the summer of eighteen thirty he traveled to Detroit to meet with Father Gabriel Richard and sought baptism for himself and his wife Elizabeth. His reasoning was political as much as spiritual: Christian conversion gave his band a connection to Catholic missionaries who had standing with the federal government, and it distinguished his people from other Potawatomi bands who had no such institutional anchor.

The strategy worked, at least partially. While most Potawatomi in Indiana were rounded up in eighteen thirty-eight and forced westward on what became known as the Trail of Death, a removal that killed dozens of men, women, and children along its six-hundred-mile route to Kansas, Leopold Pokagon's Catholic band was exempted. They remained in Michigan, purchasing land near the Saint Joseph River with their own funds, a rare act of self-preservation in a period of systematic dispossession.

Leopold's son Simon Pokagon became a writer and activist, composing poetry and essays in English and in his native Potawatomi language, and living long enough to speak at the eighteen ninety-three World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Indiana established Pokagon State Park in nineteen twenty-five on the glacially carved landscape of lakes and forested hills where the family had lived. The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in nineteen thirty-four and spent eight years building the park's most beloved structures, the inn, the nature center, the toboggan run that draws visitors to this lake country on winter weekends.