The Spokesrider

I was on my way from Peru to Chili to look at the place where Flower’s village had once been. This back road is called Warsaw Trail. I take it that it was once the main road between Peru and Warsaw. This segment of what remains of that road is fairly modern. It even has [...]

I don’t know why that lake got his name. One of the places where he had his village for a few years was on a reservation a couple miles north of Miami, Indiana. I made a couple of stops in Miami on my way from Kokomo to the former site of the reservation.

June 1. The building is in Miami County, near Peru, on the south side of the Wabash. The sign says “Poor Farm Country Candies” but it turns out that this was not the poor farm where James Malcom ended his days. There was a poor farm a few miles to the west, where it operated [...]

It isn’t often these days that you’ll hear a wife tell her husband (or vice versa) that, “If we keep on like this, we’ll end up in the poor house.” Yet there have been such places as poor farms, some of which were even called poor farms. Twenty-five years ago, when my father-in-law died, we [...]

Squirrel (aka Niconzah) was a Miami leader who lived in this area in the 1820s and 1830s. The boundaries of this reserve (which is just one in a series of places where he lived) are shown on an old county atlas. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can even say that if you look at the tree line in this photo, that you’re seeing part of his former reserve.

I had forgotten just how much I enjoy the Eel River country, even though I had designated the Eel River country as a favorite after a ride there back in 2007. The last part of today’s ride took me to a part of it that was further downstream than the places I had visited that [...]

I’ve decided, for now at least, that the upper Eel River should be one of my favorite places to go riding. The terrain was very gently rolling, there were cattle pastures to supplement the corn and soybean fields, the soybean leaves are turning to their fall pastel colors, the homes along the way were nice [...]