The Miami Removal: Canal Boats and Exile
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
In early October of eighteen forty six, Miami people were loaded onto canal boats in Fort Wayne, the place they called Kiihkayonki. Some came willingly, resigned to the inevitable. Others came under military escort. All of them were leaving the land their people had occupied for at least a century, the land at the confluence of three rivers that they had called home since before the French arrived.
The Miami had managed to delay this moment longer than almost any other Indiana tribe. When the federal Indian Removal Act passed in eighteen thirty, the Potawatomi were forced out in eighteen thirty eight, in a brutal overland march to Kansas during which at least forty people died of disease and exposure. The Miami used legal challenges, diplomatic negotiations, and the personal relationships that Chief Richardville had cultivated with federal officials to buy time. They were the last people to be removed from Indiana.
But removed they were. The treaty of eighteen forty had promised removal. By eighteen forty six, federal patience had run out. Approximately three hundred Miami were loaded onto canal boats, many of them the same waterway that Irish laborers had just finished building. They traveled the canals south to Cincinnati, then overland by rail and river to Kansas.
The records go quiet on the details of how many were sick, how many were coerced, what was said at the banks of the Saint Marys when the boats pulled away from Kiihkayonki for the last time. The documents that survive are government reports. The personal testimonies are sparse.
What is documented is the aftermath. A small number of Miami with mixed-blood status and property holdings were allowed to remain in Indiana. Their descendants became the Miami Nation of Indiana, a state-recognized but federally unrecognized tribe today, still seeking the federal acknowledgment that was stripped from them in eighteen ninety seven.
The canal boats that carried the Miami away are long gone. The river that watched them leave still runs through downtown Fort Wayne.
