Here’s a photo of the Spokesrider from August, on a day ride from Bremen to Bruce Lake to Rochester, IN.  I picked this photo for today, September 14, because today a ceremony was held there to place a Trail of Death marker.  (The Trail of Death is also known as the Trail of Courage in local events commemorating it.)  The man depicted in the statue is Menominee, a Potawatomi leader who refused to sign the treaty by which the last remaining land in Indiana was taken from them.   He wouldn’t really have worn a headress like that, but this statue is from a time when that was the standard image of an Indian chief.

Most of the treaties the U.S. made with native peoples were honored.  Well, maybe honored is not a good word.  Let’s say the letter of the treaties was adhered to.   The dishonesty and sleaze was usually in the means used to get the Indian leaders to sign.  But in this case Menominee didn’t sign, so the U.S. simply used naked force to take his reserve and evict him from Indiana.

Here is what John Tipton, Indian agent in charge, wrote about it immediately after the roundup:

Every thing seems to justify the belief that these unhappy people will yet learn to appreciate the interest which government has ever taken in their situations, and teach themselves that a yielding compliance to such interest, will but secure the comfort and enjoyment which for years they have failed to experience in Indiana–”

–Tipton to David Wallace, September 3, 1838, Tipton Papers, Volume 3, page 690.  

Noblesse oblige, anyone?

If you google for information about it on the web, you’ll find that a lot of the writing and research has been done by Shirley Willard, County Historian for Fulton County.  She has done much over the years to raise awareness of this whole historical episode, and also to bring Potawatomi people from Kansas to meet with non-Anishinabe people for a time of remembering  at an annual “Trail of Courage” weekend.    I had an opportunity to talk with her Tuesday, and she invited me to come to the events.    But it hardly ever works for me to attend such things unless they’re really close to home.

I stopped to take a snapshot of this barn early in a ride to Bruce Lake.  It wasn’t too many miles south of Bremen.   A dog was barking somewhere in the background.

When I got back on my bike, a whole pack of beagle-like dogs came out on the road to greet me.  Suddenly I remembered.  I had been here before!  I had encountered this same dog pack last September, though the dogs were a little smaller then.   Unfortunately I didn’t stop to take a photo.  Last time I hadn’t known what to expect from them at first, but this time it was like renewing old acquaintances.   They were all as friendly as they were a year ago, and none of them had shown any interest in having a bicyclist for lunch.

Now that  I recognized that I had been here before, I had an idea of what else to expect a few miles down the road.   I’m always looking for new places to ride, but it’s pleasant to find one’s self in familiar places, too.

By the way, there is a community of beardless Amish on the east side of Goshen. Except they may be Mennnonites, not Amish. The men are all clean shaven, but there are the usual horse-drawn buggies, similar to others in this part of the world. I wish I knew more about how that came to be, and what their relationship to other Mennonite and/or Amish communities in the area is.

There was a lot of buggy traffic coming and going on both the east and west sides of Goshen this Sunday afternoon. Drivers always have a friendly wave for me on my bicycle, except when it’s a young man out with his girlfriend.

At one point where the county road was none too wide, a big pickup truck just had to squeeze between me and an oncoming Amish buggy carrying a young family, leaving a cloud of exhaust as it accelerated away from me. The young father and I waved to each other after it passed, but I could tell he and his family didn’t appreciate the close encounter with that pickup any more than I did.

If I recall correctly, this happened near the Elkhart-LaGrange county border.

Something I just now learned from the LaGrange County Chamber of Commerce web site: The population of LaGrange is 37 percent Amish. The county’s Amish population is the 3rd largest in the U.S., presumably measured on a per-county basis. Well, I knew there were Amish people almost everywhere you go in LaGrange County, but I would not have guessed they made up that high a percentage of the total population.

I took a good, long lunch break in Topeka. My usual travels from Topeka take me to the David Rodgers county park, which is one of my favorite places in the area, and on the Haw Patch road to LaGrange. The Haw Patch road is a pleasant one for riding. It doesn’t follow the section lines, but twists and rolls gently.

One mental photo from several years ago on that road  is of encountering a young Amish father on a Saturday afternoon. He was teaching a son, probably around 11 years old, how to handle a team of horses. The team wasn’t hitched up to a wagon or anything — the boy with reins in hand was walking behind the team, and the father was walking behind him giving him quiet instructions, carrying a baby in his arms. It was a perfect picture.

But this time I headed straight west from Topeka, which took me on a road I had not been on before. The road departs from its straight line to make its way between a few lakes, and then there were no more Amish to be seen for a few miles.

The 1882 county history of LaGrange and Noble counties says this:

The facts seem to be about as follows: As early as 1833, and perhaps 1832, the trading-house of Comparet & Bowrie, or Comparet & Cuttieaur, at Fort Wayne, sent to the Tamarack one or more Frenchmen to open a trading station with the Indians. A small cabin was at first built, but later a double log building designed for a hotel was erected, in which the traders had a small stock of goods, including whisky, which they sold to the Indians, who often came there in great numbers. A man named Runeaux was one of these traders. He is said to have been a brother-in-law of Comparet. After his death, which occured quite early, his widow (Comparet’s sister) conducted the tavern for the Fort Wayne firm. This tavern was built of tamarack poles, six or eight inches in diameter, and was known far and near as the “Tamarack House”. In July, 1836, Burris & Durand, or Burris & Hitchcock, built a dam and saw-mill just south of the Tamarack House.

This house seemd to be at approximately the right place, but I wasn’t sure. There was a small cemetery behind it. I knocked on the door — a radio was playing but nobody came to the door. It was obviously a very old house, despite the newer siding. The foundation looks like a stone foundation over which a modern layer of concrete has been poured. I took some photos, then headed south down the road and came to a stream passing under the road through culverts. There was no sawmill there now, but that location fit the description perfectly.

I rode back to the house for more photos. Across the road from the above-pictured house was another, newer home. I stopped and asked there if people in the area knew anything about an old trading post at this site. The man did not, but did mention that the old house across the street used to be a bar, he thought. He said his parents lived there and were not home now, but said it would be fine for me to go visit the cemetery behind the house.

I wish I knew how old that house was, but I’ll bet it was standing there in 1882 when the county history was written. So it’s a link to the past, as a likely successor to whatever building was here in the 1830s.

The destination for the second day’s ride from Bremen was on the south edge of LaGrange county, 50 miles from camp if I went the short way, which I did not.

First I wanted to look for the grave of Frederick Garver, west of Goshen. I had come here back in early June and had looked at a lot of cemeteries, but I somehow neglected to ride an extra mile to the place where he had actually lived.

On the way I saw this Amish ballfield. At least I presume it’s Amish. There were some Amish homes right next to it. (The farm in the background of the photo is not one of them.) And Amish people sometimes play baseball. (What was new to me this year was seeing several basketball courts in Amish schoolyards. But I later discovered from this blog entry that maybe it was new only to me.)

What is the contraption in deep centerfield, though? An Amish batting cage? That’s my best guess.

Speaking of guessing, it was just a couple of miles before reaching this point on my ride that I had stopped at an intersection to refold my maps in preparation for my exploration of Frederick Garver country. An older man on a moped stopped to ask if I needed help, and we got to talking. (I like roads where one can stand out in the middle and talk without there being any cars to get out of the way of.) I told him about my search for cemeteries in the area, and he had some useful information for me.

At one point he said, “You’re about 60, aren’t you?” I told him not quite, but that I would be 59 in another month. That was a pretty good guess just the same. He said he was 65. It has happened too often, though, that older guys guess my age too high. I remember the time when I had just turned 40 and a much older man at work was surprised — he had thought I was 50.

One of the reasons I do long-distance bicycle riding is it makes me feel young again. It doesn’t exactly help the cause when I hear things like that.

So I was pleased Friday in the lunchroom when a young woman — one of the grad students — said, “How old are you, anyway? I didn’t think you were that old!” And one reason she gave was my bicycling.

She asked because in the question-and-answer period after the morning seminar I had mentioned that the techniques now being promoted were exactly the same as what was being promoted in the teaching methods classes I had taken 39 years ago. So I told the young woman that I had been 20 at the time. I also thought to thank her for the mistake. Her question was a welcome change, because there were times this past spring when bicycling didn’t make me feel younger.

I’ll get back to Frederick Garver in the next post or so.

Toisa’s village and reservation had been here Now there is a different sort of riverside village — lots of cottages and mobile homes, some of them in not very good condition.

I haven’t been able to find much information about Toisa. His name is on a few treaty documents. At one point there was talk of his going with Aubenaubee to visit the Choctaw academy for Indians in Kentucky, but I don’t know if the two of them actually went.

Further downriver I came to the likely location of Masac’s village, but had a hard time finding anything photogenic. The road was pretty well shaded, and now the sun was definitely low enough to make it hard to take photos at all. I dug out my cell phone to check the time. No wonder. It was far later than I had thought.

I rode a little faster and didn’t make any more photo stops. Myra picked me up a short distance outside of Rochester, and we drove back to the campground. I had several more places to visit on the northeast side of Rochester, but they would have to wait for another time.

It had been a 38 mile ride, which was OK for the first day. I had done so little riding since the July Amishville outing, that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do 200 miles in the four days. But this 38-mile starter ride didn’t leave me very tired at all, so that was a good sign that it would be OK.

From Tippecanoe I rode across the river to the west side, and then headed south as close to the river as ridable roads would take me. This was one of them.

One good rest stop for photos deserved another a few hundred yards later.

I recrossed the river back to the east side to get a look at the town of Talma.  I found a historical marker I was looking for, and then saw this building.  Wow. That’s the smallest high school I had ever seen, I thought.  It reminded me of the high school in Royal, Nebraska — even though I don’t think I ever saw that building.  (And Royal hasn’t had a high school since 1964, I just now learned on the web.)
In the very early 1960s I attended a different small high school in Nebraska — Center High School — just off the edge of the Santee Sioux Indian reservation.   Maybe a third of the students came from the reservation. There were eight students in my Freshman class, which was a typical class size.  We had a good basketball team that year — it went to the state tournament. But during the regular season we played against one school that was substantially smaller than ours — Royal High School.  I remember the tiny quonset-hut gym — not that ours was such a huge building, either.

So when I looked at this building and the sign, I thought this must be as small as Royal’s high school. And who knows, maybe Indiana had some small schools, too. Indiana can be stubborn about things like that.  But it soon dawned on me, thanks to the historical marker and some other things I had read — that this was the Lion’s Club building, not a school.  The stone marker is all that’s left of the high school that stood here until it was destroyed by a tornado in 1974.  As far as I know, it was not rebuilt.

This is a photo looking north from the south edge of Tippecanoe, taken on my first visit ever to the area in summer 2000. I remembered the railroad tracks, which seemed to serve as a giant speed bump for the road into town. It’s as if the railroad grade didn’t deign to run at the same level as the town.

I’m sure there’s a good reason for that. There’s a river nearby that has to be crossed, and I suppose the higher the grade level, the better. But it reminds me of my first impression of the town.

A couple of weeks ago I found a description in the Marshall County history that was published in 1881. I had to laugh, because if you had shown me that description with the name of the town blacked out, and asked me which town in the area it was describing, I would without hesitation have told you “Tippecanoe”. Except that now in the 21st century it was too worn out and run down to be wicked any longer.

A writer for one of the local county papers, in 1872, described Tippecanoe Town… ” … The town enjoys the reputation of being somewhat wicked, but it is no more, perhaps, in this respect, than many other places that might be mentioned possessing superior advantages. Of all the inhabitants, there is not one man that makes any profession of religion. There has never yet been a house of worship erected in the place, or in the township, either, I am told. There are one or two schoolhouses where a few people assemble to worship their Creator. ….” While there was some truth in the writer’s statements, yet his opinions were undoubtedly warped by personal feelings. The people of Tippecanoe Town and the inhabitants of the township generally, are as moral and upright and as intelligent as are usually found in localities somewhat isolated from the benefits of an advanced civilization.

What a slam, eh? The county history writer distances himself from the popular prejudice against the town, but can’t help repeating it, anyway. (Nor can I, for that matter.) And such a polite way of saying the people are stupid, backward, uncivilized, and immoral!

Now why did Tippecanoe look to me like a town that once had a reputation like that? I’ll bet the above photo doesn’t give that impression to anyone else, even though it’s a reminder for me. My ride through there this summer certainly didn’t give that impression.

Maybe there are several factors. For one, there is another spot on the map, just to the north, called “Old Tip Town.” That’s where Tippecanoe was in the 1870s. It later moved a mile south to be next to the railroad when it came though. A name like that evokes a certain image.

And maybe it was also some of the places I had been riding through before I got there.

Here I had happened upon an old church cemetery. The foundation of the church was still there, as were the concrete steps leading up into it, all overgrown with vegetation. A marker said, “Former site of Saint Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church Toisa / 1853 1931.” It put me in a ghost-town frame of mind.

And somewhere between that cemetery and Tippecanoe, I came across this bridge. No, it’s not one I rode across. I presume that’s the Tippecanoe River flowing under it, but I don’t remember just where this bridge was. Was it at Old Tip Town? I didn’t see anything like it when I was there this time. I suppose it didn’t have a great future ahead of it back in 2000, so maybe it no longer exists.

The cemetery and bridge could easily have given me the impression that I was in an old, decrepit corner of Indiana. But what about the “once-wicked” part? I guess I don’t have a good excuse for that.

The first time I had been to Tippecanoe, probably in 2000, it seemed I had stumbled on a place that was far away from everything else and that everything was several decades old. I’ve felt that way in a few other crossroads towns in Indiana. But this one didn’t give that impression this time. Last time there had been a small, run-down country stores with narrow aisles and not a huge selection to choose from. It’s still there and is much the same inside, except that it has recently undergone an expansion! The whole place no longer seemed like the proverbial town that time forgot. (Which brings to mind some old Bob and Ray skits, but never mind.) Other than the new addition to the store, I have no idea what made it seem different this time. It probably had a lot more to do with how my day had been going than with what the town was really like.

Just a bit further west from the River’s Edge Farm, the road crossed the Tippecanoe, the 2nd of many crossings for me that day. I stopped to take some more photos of the area that had been part of Chechawkose’s reserve.

There was not a lot of traffic on this road, but a car came by every couple of minutes. One pickup slowed down and almost stopped. When I was able to, I turned around to look. Usually it’s someone asking if I need help. This was a man with close-cropped hair behind a rolled-up window. He didn’t look like someone who was going to offer some friendly assistance. We looked at each other briefly, and then he sped up and drove off, leaving me to look at the big confederate flag on his rear window.

I’ve been studying that map of Indian reserves more closely, and now it looks like I may not have been taking pictures of Chechawkose’s reserve. As best as I can now tell from that map, I was traveling on the northern boundary of the reserve. I should have been taking photos on the other side of the road — the south side. But the sun was already low enough in the sky that it would not have made for good picture-taking in that direction. These photos are probably of the land just off the reservation to the north. I’m glad I took them anyway.

Not that the actual boundary meant much. While they were living here the Potawatomi people didn’t have any reason to restrict their activities to the land inside the boundary, and the American settlers had no intention of allowing the boundary to keep them from taking the land inside it. I’m not sure if this particular reserve was even surveyed. Some of the similar reserves further upstream in Kosciusko county were surveyed and have left marks on the landscape to this day. (I have photos about it from a bike outing in Fall 2006.) So far I haven’t found any such marks for the reserves in Marshall and Fulton counties. But I still have a lot to learn about them.

I didn’t see any more Amish places south of US-30. Five miles south of Etna Green I turned west on a less-traveled county road. I wanted to see the country that had been part of Che-chaw-kose’s reservation. The above-pictured place is on this land, very near the Tippecanoe River. [Edit & Note: Actually, it may be just slightly off the reservation, so to speak. See the next blog post. jbg, 22-Aug-2007]

This map is a snippet of one of many maps of Indian land cessions at memory.loc.gov. Chechawkose was a Potawatomi leader who had been granted a ten-section reservation at one of the 1832 treaties held on the Tippecanoe River. Other leaders had been granted other reservations, some of which are also shown on this map. Granting these reservations was a way to induce them to sign away the greater part of the land the Potawatomi still had had in Indiana up to this time.

But the Americans were not satisfied with that. They wanted these remaining reservations, too, and wanted the Potawatomi to agree to move west beyond the Mississippi. But Chechawcose was one of a handful of the leaders who didn’t cooperate. He refused to sell.

So the American agent in charge of Indian removal, Abel C. Pepper, found some other men to sell. Not that they had any authorization to do that, but they were in debt to traders. Neither Pepper nor any of the other Americans involved was very fussy about legalities or details of who was authorized. Chechawcose and some of the other refusers then threatened to kill the men who sold the land out from under them, but the removal operation proceeded.

The source for this is R. David Edmunds’ essay in the book of George Winter’s art (Indians and a changing frontier) that I referred to in an earlier blog article.

I looked to see if James Clifton had had anything to say about Chechawcose in his book, The Prairie People. He didn’t, but the book contains a reference to an earlier holder of that name, from the time of the Fox wars in the early 1700s. According to the index, the name means Little Crane. And it’s true that Potawatomi names that have the “ose” ending as rendered in English usually are diminutive forms of a name. For example, Ogema (leader, chief) vs. Okemos (little chief). An Okemos gave his name to a town just outside of East Lansing, Michigan. I’m not sure in what sense he was “little” — whether it referred to physical stature or what.