Last week Monday, after visiting the likely site of Isaac McCoy’s mission in Raccoon Township, Parke County, Indiana, I headed west to Rosedale and then north back to Rockville along the Catlin Road.

That last stretch was an especially pleasant ride. There had been a wind out of the southwest all day, and now it was finally at my back.

But it was also nice the way the road followed the edge of the valley of Little Raccoon Creek. I should someday compile a list of these types of roads. The bottom of the valley is flat and is good farmland. In the photo above, corn is growing down in this valley. Little Raccoon Creek is off by the distant trees. Rather than have the road use up good farmland, it was made to run just along the lower edge of the side of the valley, just high enough that one can have a view of the valley bottom.

Another place like this is the Valley Road in southern Van Buren County, Michigan, which looks out over the Dowagiac Creek valley. There was also one in Kalamazoo County, closer to my home, along the lower end of Gull Creek, until a few years ago when the Galesburg Schools destroyed it by building a new high school there, with housing developments following it. Another that’s much like these is in St. Joseph County, along the Nottawa Prairie. In that case the flat land is not a river valley. But the effect is much the same. You ride along, slightly above the level of the prarie on the left, with the ground rising to gentle hills on the right. The early settlers built their homes just up on the higher ground, and that is where the homesteads are still located.

Here in the Little Raccoon Creek valley, a cemetery was on the higher ground to my left as I rode north. I couldn’t have asked for a better view of what I had come to see. What I was interested in was the road that goes off toward the creek in the distance. On the maps put out for the Bridge Festival (which are good bicycling maps, too) it’s called Pipeline Road. Delorme calls it County Road 21.

The above is a map snippet from the Raccoon Township map in the 1874 atlas. The arrow points to the road that is now called Pipeline Road. The line running from upper left to lower right is the Ten O’Clock Treaty line. The road is a place where that Treaty boundary has left a mark on the landscape.

Under the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, the Native peoples ceded the land to the south of this line. Tecumseh used the signing of this treaty to bolster his cause, because it showed that what he and his brother had predicted was coming true. The Americans really were on their way to taking all the Indian land.

The writer of the 1880 history of Parke County tells what happened next:

…and so the Ten O’clock line was legally established. But Tecumseh angrily declared the line should never be run, and by his hostility the settlement of this county was delayed at least ten years. In July, 1810, he sent emissaries down the river to steal horses, and do other acts to provoke war; but after they passed the Montezuma village the Weas of Parke and Vigo sent warning to Harrison, and little damage was done. The following month Tecumseh met Harrison at Vincennes, and again vehemently declared that he would not allow the surveyors to run the line, or settlement to be made near it…

But of course, the line did eventually get run, and the Pipeline Road runs along a small piece of it.