The Spokesrider

These photos are from a four-day ride last Thursday-Sunday.  (You can click on them to see them in larger size.)  I got in about 210 miles of riding, but it seemed I spent most of my time sitting around and visiting with people I met along the way.  That is not a bad thing. Two [...]

There was a nice-looking Minnesota dairy barn on the other side of the road from my resting place at Oaks Lake. But as I got closer, I saw that it was a former dairy barn. The place looked like it may have been an active farmstead recently, but no longer. Four miles north there was [...]

On Sunday’s ride, as usual I stopped briefly at the site of the Door Village fort that had been built during the Black Hawk war. Since the last time I was here a wooden sign had been added to complement the stone marker that had been erected in 1909. And it looks like the owners [...]

Last weekend I salvaged three days of what was supposed to have been a week-long outing. The first day I rode to Bristol, IN (70 miles). We spent most of the second at the Elkhart County Historical Museum and a historic house, ending with a 30 mile ride. On the 3rd I rode 39 miles, [...]

This is Joliet Road on Door Prairie in LaPorte County, Indiana, from my 2004 ride to the Black Hawk war zone. It’s somewhere between Door Village and Westville. This is a map of Michigan Road Lands from the Indiana State Library. I’ve drawn the route between Door Village and Westville on it. The road lands [...]

The first time I rode southwest from Niles, Michigan along Black Hawk’s old trail, was in 1997 or 1998. I had sampled some of the Sauk Trail in Michigan (US-12) and found the road in poor repair — not pleasant to ride on in many places. Much of it has since been resurfaced, and is [...]

When news of the Black Hawk war reached Indiana and Michigan in the spring of 1832, settlers came together for mutual protection and started to build forts. This location in LaPorte County, Indiana, is one where a fort was not just started, but actually built. It even got some use as a staging place for [...]