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 another fine setting for a farm near water.

According to the BLM’s land patent database, the land shown in these two photos was homesteaded under the famous 1862 Homestead Act. That got me to thinking (for no particularly good reason). I wondered how far I would have to go from my home near Battle Creek to get to a parcel of land that was obtained under the 1862 Homestead Act. One can search the database for parcels obtained under any particular act of Congress, so it’s not extremely hard to find out. I didn’t want to take the time to look in all directions, though, so decided to pick the direction of Black Hawk’s home. I started with Calhoun County, then went south to Branch County, then west to St. Joseph County, Cass County, Berrien County, St. Joseph County, Indiana, and LaPorte County. And there, in LaPorte County, I found one of those 1862 Homestead Act homesteads.

It consisted of 1.5 acres on an island in a lake — nothing at all like Pa Ingalls wanted for a farm, but it’s patented under the same Homestead Act as those Minnesota farms were.   I wonder if there is a story of how somebody realized that it had been overlooked by all of the land buyers up until then, so decided that was a good way to take ownership. It’s very close to Black Hawk’s old path, so I’ll probably ride there to take a look some time.

Here it is: a patent for “one acre and forty five hundredths of an acre”.

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 of the property have got into the spirit of things by placing a cannon near their front porch. I am not aware that the Michigan militiamen who stayed here on their way to Chicago had any cannons with them, but still, I thought it was a nice touch.

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, ending at Door Village in LaPorte County.

The Joliet Road through Door Village and Door Prairie has long been one of my favorite places. It’s a part of Black Hawk’s old route, aka the Sauk Trail. It’s a part that goes through quiet prairie cropland.

Except it’s not so quiet any more. It’s still a good place to ride, but the road and crossroads are coming to be lined with homes. Those in the above photo are just a few of those that are new since my last ride through the place, which perhaps was as long ago as Fall 2004. This used to be a road on which I could contemplate how it must have been when Black Hawk and his entourage would come through. Now all the residential development makes it harder to turn my mind back to those times.

It’s somewhat distressing to see how some of my favorite places are changing, but probably not as destressing to me as it was to Black Hawk when he came through in the 1820s. Each year, especially on the eastern part of the Sauk Trail in the last half of that decade, there were more European-American settlers and more farms and cabins. It wasn’t the same anymore.

YTD mileage: 930.5

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 are the areas shaded in white. The Michigan Road does not pass through the place shown here, though it isn’t too far away to the north. In the 1826 Treaty of Mississinewa, the Potawatomi people in Indiana ceded to the United States a strip of land through their remaining territory, so a road could be built from Lake Michigan to the Wabash River, and from there to Indianapolis and on to the Ohio River. They also ceded a square mile of land contiguous to the road for each mile. The U.S. Congress soon afterward authorized Indiana to sell that land to pay for construction costs.

This entry shows where the road passed thorugh Fulton County, as an example of how it worked.

But there was a controversary over which square miles of land could be used to pay for the parts of the road that passed through parts of Indiana that had already been ceded to the United States in previous treaties. A state road commission for this purpose tried to select land in those previous cessions that still had not been sold by the federal government. But the federal land offices said, in effect, “No, that’s ours to sell; go take land from the Indians.”

The Indian agent John Tipton then wrote to the Land Office in Washington:

I feel bound to state to you, and through you to the President, that at the time of negotiating this treaty, these Indians did not understand that their land, not embraced within the bounds of the tract then ceded, would be required to construct this road, except where the road passed through the country retained by them; and that they understood the sections requried to construct the road through the ceded land would be taken therefrom precisely in the manner in which the commissioners have selected it. This was also my understanding of this treaty at the time it was made. Should the United States cause these lands to be sold, and the State of Indiana be authorized to take the best lands now owned by these Indians, it will greatly disappoint and distress them… Two, or at most four years, may find Indiana clear of these Potawattamies, provided a tender course is pursued towards them…” (Tipton to Elijah Hayward, November 8, 1830, Tipton papers, Volume 2, pages 366-367)

It’s not hard to guess what happened. The Potawatomi had to give up more of their land to pay for parts of the Michigan Road, even parts that were far away from any area they ever occupied.

And the state road commissioners were not bashful about taking the land of highest value, including a lot of excellent cropland in LaPorte County. Enough to pay for about 55-60 miles worth of the road is shown on the map above.

I didn’t notice until preparing the overlay above that the road commissioners were careful not to select section 16 from the townships that are shown, e.g. the section in which Door Village is located. That was land that the federal government would eventually give to Indiana anyway, for the purpose of funding schools.

And why the odd 80-acre holes in the selection, I don’t know. Maybe a look at a topo map would tell me. Or it might make for an interesting bicycle detour to take a look. In any case, I plan to take the above map along with me next time I go riding there, so I can compare the Michigan Road lands with the lands the road commissioners did not select. (In the case of the land shown in the photo, I just don’t remember exactly where along the route it was taken, even though I’ve ridden there several times.)

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 much better to ride on now. But back then, I was glad to find that here was a piece of Black Hawk’s old road that was such a pleasant place to ride — there wasn’t a lot of traffic to disturb thoughts of how it might have been back in the 1820s.

Chicago Trail

It had been an idyllic ride, so it was a bit of a shock to all of a sudden come across a Chicago commuter train track at Hudson Lake. Talk about a quick jolt back to the 20th century.

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 those few Michigan militia units that went as far as Chicago.

The road in the background is now West Joliet Road, to the southwest of LaPorte. In Black Hawk’s day it was the Sauk Trail, the route by which Black Hawk and other native peoples travelled to Fort Malden, on the other side of the Detroit River, to maintain their relationship with the British.

Much of the road here in LaPorte County has even been designated a bike route now. It’s a good one to ride along and think about the changes that have taken place since Black Hawk used to come through.

This is on Black Hawk’s old road, looking west. It’s a few miles west of Door Village, which is a little village southwest of LaPorte, Indiana. It’s the road Black Hawk used to take in the 1820s when he went back to his home on the Mississippi after visiting Fort Malden in Canada, and it’s the road the Michigan militia used when they marched to Illinois in the 1832 Black Hawk war.

A fort had been actually built at Door Village during the Black Hawk war, and it was used by militia contingents marching from Michigan to Chicago. Most of the 1800+ men who are listed as having served did not leave Michigan. Many of them probably did not even leave their home counties. But there were some who did go all the way to Chicago.

The location of the Door Village fort is shown by the yellow circle along the Sauk Trail.

I had looked several months ago for the files that I had used to make this map, and came to the conclusion that I had accidentally deleted them. Tonight I looked some more. I want to enlarge and modify this map to show more of my 2006 and 2007 bike rides. Starting over from scratch was almost too terrible to contemplate. But I found the files!