The old Michigan Road, north from Rochester, Indiana, is a reasonably nice place for a bicycle. U.S. 31 now bypasses the old road, leaving this one good for riding.

This afternoon I made a map showing the route of the old Michigan Road through the entire length of Indiana, from the Madison on the Ohio River, to Michigan City. (If you click on it, you can see the whole thing.)

I got to wondering about a bicycle ride the entire length of it. There are places where it’s probably not the best for riding, and some places where it has been obliterated by an Interstate Highway for several miles. But it looks like there are several places where an old version of the road is probably the less travelled one, and I know from experience that there are places in the northern counties where the new road that has superceded it is ridable. I wouldn’t necessarily insist on riding on the road the entire distance, so long as I could ride near it and cross it now and then to see what it looks like. Whether I’d ride through Indianapolis would be negotiable.

Continuing north of Rochester on the old road for a few miles, one comes to this sign where the road crosses the Tippecanoe River. “Land granted by the Potawatomi Indians” is a an interesting way to put it when you consider how it was done.

On a political discussion list:

He: “Where is your sense of humor. Eloped with your sense of decency?
Me: “How am I supposed to keep track of things like that? I have enough trouble keeping track of where I am, much less anyone else.”
He: “Prove that you are having enough trouble keeping track of where you are.”

So I got back to the map I was working on last weekend. If I had had it when I was bicycling in Fulton County earlier this month, I would have kept better track of where I was. As it is, I need to go back for more riding someday, to visit some of the spots I missed.

Today I started to add some of the history sites to the map. (Click on the snippet above to go to a page that contains the whole thing.) The brown areas are Indian reserves that were left for the Potawatomi people after they ceded most of the rest of their Indiana land in the 1832 treaties. The purplish areas are Michigan Road lands. In an 1826 treaty the Potawatomi people agreed to allow a road to be built through their remaining land, and to give up one square mile of land for each section of road. This land (minus the right-of-way) was sold to pay for the expenses of clearing the road. That much the Potawatomi people knew they had agreed to in 1826. What they didn’t know was that they were going to be forced to give up additional square miles of land for the portions of the road that lay outside their territory. (Highway 31 is the successor to the original Michigan Road north of Rochester.)

Most of those additional square miles were the rich prairie lands of LaPorte County. But there were three such pieces here in Fulton County, too. One is the square mile around the outlet of Lake Manitou in present-day Rochester. I need to learn more about that. One of the provisions of the 1826 treaty was for the government to build a mill for the Potawatomi people here. This place was called Potawatomi Mills before it was called Rochester. So how it was that the road commissioner thought he could take that land to sell to investors to pay for road construction, I don’t know. It would have depended somewhat on just when it was sold, I suppose.

Another was a 80-acre section north of Rochester. I wanted to go there to see if I could tell just what made that particular parcel of land so valuable that the road commissioner would have picked it. When I got there, I could see nothing from the public road that made sense. There was a drainage ditch along the edge of it, suggesting that it was probably too swampy for farming back in the 1830s.

There it is, across the road from this fence post. Doesn’t look like anything special to me, either.

Well, after I was all done with my rides I learned I had been looking in the wrong place. I should have been a mile north. But it was too late now. I had got photos of the wrong place. I remember what the northwest corner of the correct property was like. In fact, it’s very near the site of the treaty meetings in 1832, if not right on it. But the rest of it? I don’t remember very well. I wasn’t scrutinizing it that carefully when I was there. So I need to go back again and take another look.

But for real proof that I have trouble keeping track of where I am, consider what happened the night after we had returned. In Rochester we had stayed in a motel for 3 nights. The first night back I woke up in the middle of the night needing to use the bathroom. It’s not something I normally need to do, even though I have only half the usual number of bladder sphincters. But I had been deprived of good coffee while in Fulton County, so had tried making up for lost time when we got back home.

I didn’t want to wake Myra, so I tried to find my way in the dark. But I got lost. Our motel room was not that big a place. How could this be? Over here was the window, and the first light of dawn was showing under the window. But how did I get turned around so the window was on my left instead of on the right. And on the right was a door. But where was the bathroom door? It should have been right next to it? I kept going back and forth in the small space, trying to make sense of it. And what were these piles of clothes? I kept going this way and that along two sides of the bed. At least I didn’t lose track of where the bed was, but aside from the fact that there was a window opposite a door, nothing made sense. Finally, out of frustration, I turned the light on. And to my surprise, I saw I was not in the motel room, but in my own bedroom at home.

Many times when traveling I’ve been confused about where I was when I first woke up. But never before have I gotten out of bed and spent so much time trying to find my way before realizing where I really was.

This is a snippet of a Fulton County map I was working on last weekend. For my Black Hawk Slept Here website I want to build a collection of maps showing a) historical sites relating to the Black Hawk war and settlement era, and b) bicycleable routes to these places.

It’s fun working with maps like this, because they bring back memories. I’ll be looking at one little road segment I hadn’t thought about for years, and suddenly I’ll recall what when I had last been there, the view, the temperature, the smells, the part of a book I was listening to at the time, etc. Sometimes I later find out that my recollections were wrong, of course. I tell people I have a very good memory about past events. It’s often a mistaken memory, but it’s a good one.

The yellow-orange lines on the map are bike routes I used in several days of riding in or through Fulton County this year. What it does not show is routes I used back in 2000 and 2001 when I did a couple of solo tours to the area. I can remember some of it, but there were places I saw then that I wasn’t able to find again this year.

This is where I camped on my last trip to Fulton County in August 2001, which was also my last bicycle tour for a couple of years. It’s on Barr Lake in Newcastle Township. I remember listening to the green frogs around the lake, and the very hot weather on the ride to this place, and the very hot weather on my ride to Aubbenaubbee township the next day. Both times I ran out of water out in the country and resorted to begging for some at peoples’ houses.

It was also memorable for being my last tour for a couple of years. Soon after came 9/11 and the news that I had prostate cancer. Last night I looked in on newsgroup alt.support.prostate.cancer and saw that some newly diagnosed and newly treated men are asking about bicycling. Maybe it’s time for me to make an appearance on that group again. I don’t have much to say about treatment options, because the people there are much more knowledgeable than I am and so much has changed since 2001 anyway. But I can talk about bicycling without a prostate.

It wasn’t just recovering from surgery that knocked me out of touring for a couple of years, but it started with that. But the main point is that there can still be bicycle touring after RRP! I’ve been riding 2000 to 5000 miles a year since then. I’m thankful for that, and for undetectable PSAs since then, and for a wife who not only lets me do a lot of bicycle touring, but aids and abets it, too!

This is Main Street in Rochester, not too many blocks from our motel.  It used to be U.S. Highway 31,  before the modern U.S. 31 bypassed the town.  Before that, it was Highway 1.  (I presume Indiana Highway 1, not US-1).

It probably got that Number One because of its importance in early Indiana history.   It was the Michigan Road, a road built from the Ohio River to Lake Michigan.  At the time it was authorized and laid out, it passed through land that had not yet been ceded by the Potawatomi people to the United States, such as the land between here and what is now South Bend to the north.  In an 1826 treaty, the Potawatomi people agreed that it could be built through their land, and agreed to allowing a square mile to be taken adjacent to the road for each mile of the road that went through their land.

What they did not know they had agreed to was giving up a square mile of their land for each mile of road that was outside their unceded land.  That was a point of considerable controversy.  But that’s how the road was financed.  Those square miles were sold to investors and settlers to pay for the construction.

The road wasn’t paved, of course, or even graveled.  It was not much more than a cleared trail when it was done.  But it got a lot of use right from the beginning.  It brought settlers into the area, and was a route by which goods could be shipped in and out of Indiana via the Great Lakes.

It was also used to ship the Potawatomi people out of Indiana.  Shortly after they agreed to give up land to pay for the road segments not only inside but also outside their territory, they were induced to agree to leave Indiana altogether.  Many of them had to be rounded up at gunpoint and marched out of the state, and a number of them died along the trip, which is now called the Trail of Death.  This historical episode is being commemorated this weekend in an event known as the Trail of Courage.   I am told that perhaps 15,000 people will take part in the events.

The Trail of Death passed through what is now this Main Street.

I was just now looking at my copy of “Potawatomi Trail of Death–1838 Removal from Indiana to Kansas,” written and edited by Shiirley Willard and Susan Campbell.  It’s something I bought at the Fulton County Historical Society museum, which is where I ended my bike ride on Wednesday.   It contains a transcription of the roster of those who were being evicted.  The heads of households are named.

One interesting name caught my attention:  O saw kee.   I’m pretty sure that is the word usually used for what are often called the Sauk Indians.  Sauk is a short form of Osaukee, which means “people of the yellow earth”.  The “aki” part of the word means earth.   The person is identified as a male in the 25-49 age group.  There are no other persons listed in his household.  So it’s not as though he is a Sauk man who married into the community.

Black Hawk, the person whose story led me to Fulton County and Rochester (among a whole lot of other places) was one of the Osaukee, which is why that name jumped out at me.  I don’t expect to ever be able to learn more about this person on the Trail of Death who was identified as Osawkee, but it’s an interesting point to wonder about.

On Tuesday of this week I did a 67 mile ride from Rochester to Little Turtle’s Village, on the east side of Columbia City.  We spent the morning at the Fulton County Historical Society museum, and I didn’t get started until 2pm.   If it had been only 55 miles like I had thought, I would have gotten to the destination before the sun went down.  I had to be content with a flash photo.

I had told Myra it was a pretty spot.  Either my memory is bad after 11 years, or a mobile home park of sorts has been placed on the site since the first (and last) time I had visited here.  The last was on a day in June 1996, on a ride from Fort Wayne to South Bend.  That day was full of surprisingly pleasant revelations about northern Indiana as a place to go bicycling.  This was just one.   I thought I remembered staring at the terrain, wondering what else was known about the locations of old Native villages.

It’s too bad about the mobile homes descrecating the spot.   I wish the property owner had seen fit to leave it as I thought I remembered it from 1996.  At times like this I’m tempted to wish the state could step in to protect the place.  But the laws to enable it to do that would also give the state the power to abuse the rights of its citizens.  And it was an abuse of power by which Little Turtle’s people and the Potawatomi had their land taken from them before they were evicted from Indiana.   So it would be rather ironic to have the state do another land grab to commemorate those of the 19th century.

This afternoon I braked to a stop by this large tree stump because it was near what was said to be one of Aubbenaubee’s villages or camps — near the north side of Anderson Lake in Aubbeenaubee Township, Fulton County.   I don’t know what species of tree that was, but from the size it looked like one that could have been growing here when Aubbenaubee lived here in the 1830s.

Just before I came to a stop, I looked over to my left, and was surprised to see two deer close to the road, who seemed to be just as surprised to see me.   I should not have been surprised, because I frequently have to brake for deer on my ride home from work.   Sometimes I have to yell at them to move off the road.   Maybe there aren’t as many deer down here in Fulton County, because I hadn’t seen a single deer, dead or alive, in three days of riding and driving in Fulton County, nor had I seen any on a similar excursion in August.

The deer and I looked at each other a second, then one of them gave a loud snort before they ran deeper in the woods.   Maybe they didn’t run far, though.  A little bit later, after I had gotten off my bike and was looking for camera angles, I heard a loud snort again, not nearly as deep in the woods as I had thought they’d gone.   That may have been an expression of disapproval for my not moving on quickly.

Aubenaubee probably would not have said “I saw two deer” quite the way this article’s title has it.   Those words are my attempt at Minnesota Ojibwe.  There are a lot of similarities between that language and Potawatomi, but the two are different languages.   In cases where words in the two languages are close cognates, Potawatomi tends to drop the unstressed vowels.   Counting words (of which niizh is one) cannot be counted on to be the same in the two languages, or even the same between different groups of Potawatomi in different parts of the country.   I don’t happen to know whether the word for deer (waawaashkeshi) is very similar in the two languages.

I also don’t know whether Aubenaubee really had a village at this site.   A local history writer of a couple decades ago said there was one near here.  Today I learned that the writer got information from a lot of sources, including local lore that in many cases has turned out not to be correct.   So on some future trip to Fulton County I’ll try to find out the basis for this particular site being identified as a village site.