Potawatomi Trail of Death

This marker recalls one of Indiana's darkest journeys. In the autumn of eighteen thirty-eight, more than eight hundred fifty Potawatomi people were forced from their homeland in northern Indiana at gunpoint and marched roughly six hundred sixty miles to eastern Kansas. It came to be called the Trail of Death.

The caravan passed through Warren County in mid September of that year, camping near Williamsport and at State Line City. Two small children who died of sickness along the road were buried at one of those camps. The march lasted about two months in late summer heat and early autumn cold, and many died, the very young and the very old most of all. The removal cleared Potawatomi land for white settlement. Today a chain of markers traces the route, so that the people who walked it, and those who never finished, are not forgotten.