The Potawatomi Trail of Death

In September of eighteen thirty-eight, a company of United States soldiers and militia arrived at Twin Lakes in Fulton County, Indiana, with orders to remove the Potawatomi people who lived there. The community was gathered at gunpoint. Many had lived on that land for generations, farming it, building homes on it. Some held treaties they believed protected their right to remain.

Eight hundred fifty-nine Potawatomi people were force-marched westward toward Kansas. The march began in late September and lasted sixty-one days. The autumn weather turned cold. Food and shelter were inadequate. Children and elders were the most vulnerable. Roughly forty people died along the route, among them children.

The Potawatomi called it the Trail of Death.

The route went through Indiana and Illinois and into Missouri. The soldiers who oversaw the march reported difficulties with weather and terrain. The Potawatomi reported something else: that they were being driven out of land they had been promised, in fall weather, without sufficient preparation, because Indiana wanted to be empty of them.

This happened in eighteen thirty-eight, thirty years before the transcontinental railroad was complete, ten years before the Mexican-American War, in a state that presented itself to the world as a model of American settled civilization. Indiana had been a state for twenty-two years. The Indiana Constitution had been in effect for that entire period. None of it protected the Potawatomi people from what the United States government chose to do to them.

The Citizen Potawatomi Nation, based in Oklahoma today, traces its origins to the communities that survived that march.