The Fall Creek Massacre Trial

In the spring of eighteen twenty-four, a small party of Native Americans came to the area along Deer Lick Creek, northeast of the new capital, to hunt and trap and collect maple syrup. On the nineteenth of March, a group of white settlers gathered for a house-raising nearby. The conversation, according to later trial testimony, turned to the Indian presence. The men drank. They made declarations about what they would do. Three days later, on March twenty-second, they killed nine people: two men, three women, two boys, and two girls.

The killers were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Three of them were executed, and a fourth received a last-minute pardon. What made this legally extraordinary, unprecedented in the history of the United States to that point, was that these were white men convicted and hanged for the murder of Native Americans under American law. No such verdict had ever been carried out before.

The federal government watched the proceedings with close attention, and not purely from justice. The Treaty of Saint Mary's had been signed just six years earlier. The Lenape and Miami had been promised that the new American law would protect them while they remained. The executions were partly a demonstration, a message to the tribes whose removal was still being negotiated: American courts would enforce the terms. Whether the jury in Madison County was moved primarily by principle or by political necessity, the historical record does not resolve cleanly. What it records is the verdict, and the rope.

The massacre and trial have no direct monument in Indianapolis proper. They occurred near present-day Pendleton, about thirty miles to the northeast, in what was then raw frontier. But the legal first they established echoes through the history of a city being built on ceded land.