The Trail of Death

In the summer of eighteen thirty-eight, the United States government decided to remove the remaining Potawatomi from Indiana. The Treaty of Yellow River had ceded their land. Most bands had already left or were preparing to. But Chief Menominee and his Yellow River band refused.

Menominee had been clear. He told the federal negotiator, Colonel Abel Pepper, that he had not sold his lands and would not sell them. When Pepper pressed further, Menominee is reported to have said simply: I will not sell them. The words are recorded in period accounts, though the exact phrasing was filtered through interpreters and written down by soldiers.

It did not matter. In late August of eighteen thirty-eight, General John Tipton arrived with a militia. Menominee was seized. His band, including children and elders who had never agreed to leave, was assembled at gunpoint near Twin Lakes, roughly fifty miles south of South Bend. On September fourth, eighteen thirty-eight, the march west began.

The journey to Kansas covered approximately six hundred sixty miles over sixty-one days. The weather turned. There was dysentery. People died along the road. By the time the group reached what is now eastern Kansas in November, more than forty people had died. Twenty-eight of them were children.

A Catholic missionary named Father Benjamin Petit traveled with the column, administering last rites. He wrote letters back east describing what he witnessed. He died the following February in Saint Louis, worn out from the journey. He was twenty-seven years old.

The forced march became known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas officially recognized it as a regional historic trail in nineteen ninety-four.

The Potawatomi had lived in the Saint Joseph Valley for generations. They were gone within a generation of the Americans arriving. The portage they had used for centuries, the one that made this city possible, had been theirs to use freely. Then it was not.