The 'Land of the Indians'
Indiana means “land of the Indians.” Thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, Indiana was home to Indigenous cultures that predate any Indian tribal affiliations. The clearest evidence of these prehistoric people—labeled Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian by archeologists—are the hundreds of earthen mounds found throughout Indiana.
At Mounds State Park near Anderson, Indiana, there are 10 different mounds and earthworks including the circular “Great Mound” built in 160 B.C. The mounds were sites for religious ceremonies and celebrations, but also for the observation of celestial bodies. The alignment of the mounds indicates they were used to track the seasons.
By the 1600s, when the first Europeans made contact, the two major Native American groups in Indiana were the Iroquois and the Algonquian. The Algonquian were composed of many different tribes and clans, including the Miami—the largest single tribe in Indiana—the Shawnee, the Lenape and the Potawatomi.
Indiana Was Part of New France
The fur trade drew European explorers into the wilderness west of the Appalachian Mountains and France was the first to claim Indiana as one of its New World colonies.
In the late 1600s, Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle, an explorer and fur trader, travelled by canoe up the Ohio River and became the first white man to enter Indiana. La Salle continued on to the Mississippi River, claiming all of the land around the Mississippi and its tributaries as part of New France. He named the massive territory Louisiana for King Louis XIV.
Founded in 1732, the French-influenced village of Vincennes is the oldest city in Indiana. When Indiana became a territory, Vincennes was its first capital.
Americans Found Northwest Territory
In the 1760s, the French lost Vincennes and other Indiana settlements to the British during the French and Indian War. The British occupied forts across the Midwest—including Fort Miami and Fort Sackville in Indiana—and declared in 1763 that no American colonists were allowed to migrate west of the Appalachian Mountains. This so-called “Proclamation Line” was one of the many grievances against British colonial rule that led to the American Revolution.
The first major military victory for the Americans in Indiana came in 1779, when George Rogers Clark defeated British forces at the Battle of Fort Sackville near Vincennes. After America won its independence, the British ceded all of its territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. The “Northwest Territory,” as it became known in 1787, included all of modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota.
The Battle of Fallen Timbers
Americans were eager to expand into the Northwest Territory, but they met fierce resistance from Indian tribes, who attacked white settlers encroaching on their ancestral lands. The British—who stubbornly refused to abandon their forts in the Northwest Territory—encouraged the local Indians to form a confederation to fight the Americans.
Led by the Miami Chief Little Turtle, the Indian confederacy won decisive victories in 1790 and 1791. But then George Washington, determined to solve the “Indian problem” in the Northwest Territory, appointed General “Mad Anthony” Wayne to lead the American forces. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, Wayne routed the Indian fighters and Chief Little Turtle signed the first of many treaties surrendering Indian lands to the Americans.
Indiana Becomes a Territory
The Indiana Territory was created by Congress in 1800 and William Henry Harrison—who would later become the ninth U.S. president—was appointed its first governor. The original size of the Indiana Territory was huge—it included all of the Northwest Territory excluding Ohio. But less than a decade later, the Indiana Territory was whittled down to the borders of present-day Indiana.
Harrison’s top priority was opening up more Indian land to white settlers, and he signed multiple treaties in the early 1800s acquiring millions of acres. But in 1809, the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh and his brother “the Prophet” objected to the Fort Wayne Treaty, saying that the 3 million acres of land weren’t for sale. When Harrison refused to dissolve the treaty, the two sides went to war.
Tecumseh urged patience while he tried to assemble a confederacy of tribes to fight the Americans. But on November 7, 1811, the Prophet attacked Harrison’s troops while Tecumseh was away. The Americans fought back and Harrison claimed victory over the Shawnee at the Battle of Tippecanoe.
During the War of 1812, many Indian tribes sided with the British, who promised that their ancestral lands would be returned if they defeated the Americans. The British loss essentially ended Native American armed resistance in Indiana.
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the forced relocation of Native Americans to reservations west of the Mississippi. In Indiana, nearly 900 Potawatomi men, women and children were forcibly marched to Kansas in 1838. Their homes and fields were burned, and at least 40 Potawatomi died on the journey, known as the "Potawatomi Trail of Death."
