I used this photo in a talk I gave for the Delton Area Rotary Club this Thursday morning. My friend Wes Knollenberg had invited me. We’ve known each other since at least 1981, but don’t see a lot of each other, and especially not in the last several years.

The photo is from Fulton County, Indiana. This is an east-west road that makes a jog here (and in many other such places) because the survey of the Michigan Road lands didn’t quite line up with the survey of the rest of the land after it was ceded to the United States by the Potawatomi people a few years later.

Wes and I talked afterwards. He is not a bicycler, but it was gratifying that he saw a lot of the same potential in these places that I do. I’ve never before had anyone spontaneously bring up so many of the points that I’ve thought about. One is that to make an area a place for bicycle tourism, you need destinations. The above photo is of a destination — if one is aware of the historical significance. There are places like that all around us — unremarkable places out in the country that, once you understand why the road turns here and not there, are worth riding out to take a look. For me, a little bend in the road like this is worth a day’s bike ride all by itself (though I often try to hit several such places in one day). Sometimes I think I’m the only person in the world who enjoys things like that, but thanks to Wes, I know it’s not such a strange concept after all.

Wes made a number of other points, which I may bring up in other blog articles.

Late edit: Here is a google map showing where the above jog in the road is located.

Jog in the road

One can see that there are such jogs in the east-west roads in many places near old US-31, which was the Michigan Road. Each “offset” is about a mile long, corresponding to one edge of the square miles that were ceded by the Potawatomi people and sold to pay for the construction of the road.

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.

This is the gravesite of Nawehquageezhik (Noonday) and his wife, Somonoque, at the east end of Cressey Road in Barry County, Michigan. The gravestone is in the mowed area to the right of the bicycle.

This story of this gravestone is connected with another gravestone near Vincennes, Indiana, that I’m hoping to ride to this year yet. There are a few degrees of separation, though.

Noonday’s grave is here because the Slater mission was located here in the late 1830s. Leonard Slater’s mission was a part of Isaac McCoy’s Baptist missions in southwest Michigan. Slater operated somewhat independently of McCoy, not that the latter man liked it that way. McCoy’s wife Christiana (after whom Christiana Creek was named) was a sister of William Polke, who among things, was one of the people who had a large role in operating the 1838 eviction of the Potawatomi from Indiana.

This is William Polke’s house on the grounds of the Fulton County Historical Museum north of Rochester, Indiana. Its original location was not far from here, where it was at the time of the Potawatomi eviction from Indiana.

The gravestone I want to visit is that of William Polke’s father, Charles, at the site of the Maria Creek Baptist church northeast of Vincennes, Indiana. That church is also where Isaac McCoy got his start in the ministry. A lot of history seems to have a connection to that Maria Creek church.

The church was disbanded in the 1940s. I had learned from this web page that as of 2004 the cemetery was almost gone, too. Most of it had been destroyed in recent years by agricultural field work. So Thursday I got on the phone to inquire whether any of the cemetery still existed, and whether it would be possible to walk to it. It’s a half mile away from the nearest road.

I ended up talking to an animated gentleman with a southern Indiana accent that I seldom get to hear in Michigan, and learned that the Polke grave still exists. And the place is pronounced Morriah, not Maria. But it had been quite a struggle dealing with the farmer, to keep him from destroying the cemetery any more than he had already done. The local people who cared about it had tried appealing to just about everyone they could think of for help in preserving it, but didn’t get much. I also learned that the farmer had died a year ago, “and is now paying for what he did.”

That’s where the theology of the grave comes in. It would be interesting to know whether it’s like that which was preached at the Maria Creek church in the 1810s.

The gentleman I talked to gave me more information about local people to talk to and local publications that tell about the church, the cemetery, and people who had worshipped there and been buried there.

Before talking to him I had had the idea that I would do a one-day ride to Maria Creek from Rockville, where we’ll be staying on our next outing. The days are short now but if I get an early start I should be able to get there in time for photos. But now I think I need to plan on spending at least a whole day in Vincennes. Maybe I’ll do the bike ride this time, and we can use Vincennes as our base camp for the next outing. We’ll see.

A lot of the roads in the upper midwest follow section lines, creating a checkerboard pattern on the landscape. A lot of roads depart from these section lines, too. At this intersection in Fulton County Indiana, County Road 400W follows a section line. County Road 475N does not. Instead, it follows what had once been the south boundary of Aubbeenaubbee’s reserve. This reserve only existed for 6-7 years, from the time of a treaty made in late 1832 in which the Potawatomi people ceded most of their remaining land in Indiana, until 1839 1838 when they were evicted from the state. And I’m not sure whether the reserve officially existed for the last few of those years.

The intersection in the photo is located at the center of the red circle in this map fragment from the 1883 Fulton County atlas. The information on that map suggests that the reserve boundary had been surveyed. Sometime I want to find out who the surveyor was and exactly when the survey took place, just in case it leads me to more bicycling destinations.

A purplish line is drawn around a road that follows the treaty line boundary — the road now known as 475N.

Looking to the east from that same spot, the reserve boundary is marked by the tree line to the left of the soybean field. I don’t know if it still is a property line boundary.

This map fragment shows some of my bike routes in the area. The intersection in question is at the center of the red circle. If you click on this piece of a map, you’ll be taken to a web page that shows the map from which it was taken.

This photo was taken September 10 a few miles south of Rochester, Indiana.  Talk about your mixed blessings.  Technology yields cheap food, which means that instead of living at a subsistence level we are wealthy enough to take time off from work to ride out and see the countryside.   It also makes it possible to farm with less labor, which yields abandoned farms and a depopulated countryside.

I came across this school on my September 11 ride from Rochester to Little Turtle’s village on the east side of Columbia City, IN. It’s on the Fort Wayne Road — the old route from Rochester to Fort Wayne before Highway 14 took over that role.

It’s called the Prill School. The brickwork is almost identical to that on one pictured in the 1997 issue of Fulton County Images, a publication of the Fulton County Historical Society. That one was called the Ebenezer School. The Prill School is northeast of Rochester, the Ebenezer school was to the south.

Shirley Willard, the Fulton County Historian, wrote in that issue about the school consolidation battles of the 1950s, long after the Ebenezer School had been consolidated with others to form the Woodrow School, which she attended. She concludes this section (which is just a small part of the story she tells) with these paragraphs, which serve to give the flavor of the issue at the time:

The state inspector condemned Woodrow because of cracked toilets in the girls rest room so Bryce Burton put in new ones. Then they called for re-inspection as the other one was in error. The inspector was angry when he saw new toilets and said, “Someone’s making a fool of me.”

The consolidation issue was placed on the ballot twice and was voted down both times. But the Indiana State Legislature passed a law to give the trustee the power to close the schools even though the majority of the people voted against it. So trustee Henry Skidmore closed the three country schools in 1959. There was much bitterness over this forced consolidation. Some people did not speak to Skidmore or any of his brothers’ families for the next 10 years, even though not all of his relatives even favored consolidation!

That was interesting to me, because it was only a year or so later that the community where we lived in northeast Nebraska was involved in a similar consolidation battle. My parents were on the anti-consolidation side. In that case, the consolidators were defeated for the time being, but much bitterness remained. You could say it was one of the formative influences leading to The Spokesrider.

This is a photo dredged up from an old web site circa 1995. (I blogged about it here, too, at The Reticulator.) It was taken just before the start of my very first bicycle tour. My youngest son is in the photo, too, and he rode partway with me some of the days. Here I’m showing him where we used to play ball in the schoolyard. We lived in a house next to the church in the background, where my father was pastor.

The school I attended was a two-room, wooden frame building, constructed in 1884, which is older than the twin to the Prill School in the Fulton County photo. It was a leaky old building with no running water, but it was a good place to go to school. I’m not sure when the district was finally consolidated and the building was torn down. I imagine population decline forced the issue if nothing else did. Local high schools now have much smaller class sizes than they did back in the early 1960s.

Most of my classmates went to Creighton to high school, three miles away. But there were several issues that came out of the consolidation battles that prompted my parents to send me elsewhere, to the small town of Center to the north, with a very small high school of about 30 students. I sometimes say (for fun) that my parents were dissatisfied with the local school so sent me away to go to school with the Indians. Center High School was on the edge of the Santee Sioux reservation, and about one-third of the students were Indian, judging by the photos in my copy of the yearbook. But that really had nothing to do with my parents’ decision — it was just an irrelevant factor as far as they were concerned.

There is more that could be said about that, but instead I’ll now go off on another tangent, with some other pix and stories from the same old web site that the schoolyard photo came from.

Before starting that 1995 bike trip, we drove to Creighton to get lunch. Myra found there a tourist brochure about Creighton businesses, with a logo of an old, bearded gold prospector and his burro on the front of it. The prospector is trying to pull the burro along, but the animal has its feet planted and is going nowhere.

Before showing me what she had found, Myra labelled the two characters Judy and John. She knew I’d enjoy the coincidence.

It so happened that when living there, we had a burro named Judy. It also so happened that in 1959 Judy and I (and our cub scout pack) took part in a parade for Creighton’s 75th anniversary celebration. Michael Landon, who at the time was Little Joe on the TV series Bonanza, was grand marshall.

This photo was taken by my mother before the parade began.

I was dressed up in a felt hat and fake beard, looking as much like the old miner on the brochure as a 10-year-old could. Judy had a shovel and pick axe strapped to her back, much as is shown.

The brochure also happens to depict our relationship quite accurately. Judy’s ideas were usually the opposite of mine. I could never get her to cross the creek running through our pasture, even in August when it was dried up. Yet when nobody was looking, she was quite capable of crossing it on her own, usually managing to be the far side when I wanted to bridle her up to ride her.

Getting a bridle on Judy was one thing; climbing onto her back was another. One technique was to get her alongside a wooden gate, from the top of which I could scramble onto her back. But this required the animal’s cooperation, and cooperation went against her nature. So although we kids would feed her, brush her coat, and otherwise provide for her, Judy seldom provided us the use of her back in return.

In the parade, though, all went well–for about one block. Then Judy stepped on a manhole cover. The noise spooked her, and she broke formation and took off at a good, stiff trot. I hung on to the halter rope and tried to stop her, but could do no more than drag my feet and slow her down a bit. The tools that had been neatly lashed to her back came loose and slipped down to her belly where they banged against her legs and bothered her even more. We passed most of the parade, I think, before she turned onto a side street and eventually came to a stop. We never made it back, and I never did get to see Michael Landon.

This incident helped Dad decide that we kids were too small to benefit from an animal like that, and some time later he sold her. He used most of the proceeds to buy my first real bicycle, a single-speed Raleigh, for about $45. (Schwinns were considered more desirable, but they cost too much for us.) Even $45 was a lot for him to have spent on me.

One of the things I like about hot summer days on Indiana’s back roads is how they take me back to the days of riding that bike (or riding horseback — yet another story) on the gravel roads near Bazile Mills. That (and the endomorphins) make me feel young again.

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.

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.