Indiana

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.  

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. 

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.  

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.  

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."  

Slavery was outlawed in the Northwest Territory, but pro-slavery forces—including William Henry Harrison—managed to win exceptions for people were enslaved before the 1787 prohibition and for “indentured servants.”  

When Indiana became a state in 1816, the Indiana constitution outlawed slavery, but it also banned free Blacks from moving to the state. The rights of Black people already living in Indiana (around 11,000) were also severely restricted.  

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hoosiers enlisted enthusiastically in the Union Army. Indiana supplied 200,000 soldiers, roughly 15 percent of the state’s population in 1860. One in eight Indiana soldiers were killed in battle or died from disease, and countless more were wounded.  

Indiana was also an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Abolitionists Levi and Catharine Coffin operated the “Grand Central Station” of the Underground Railroad out of their home near Newport, Indiana. The devout Quaker couple helped more than 1,000 enslaved people reach freedom in Canada. 

In 1821, the Indiana General Assembly voted to move the capital from Corydon in Southern Indiana to a more central location. Legislators named the new city Indianapolis. The railroad came to Indianapolis in 1847 and the state slowly transformed from an agricultural economy to an industrial hub over the second half of the 19th century.  

Natural gas was discovered in Indiana in 1886, which provided cheap energy for companies willing to relocate their factories to the “gas belt.” The Ball Brothers moved from Buffalo, New York to Muncie Indiana in 1887 and opened their glass factory, which quickly became the largest canning-jar producer in the world. The Ball Brothers later used their fortune to found Ball State University 

At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. Steel decided to open a new steel mill in Indiana along the shore of Lake Michigan. The company named the new mill and its surrounding city after U.S. Steel’s president, Elbert H. Gary. Powered by the steel industry, Gary, Indiana soon became an industrial center of the Midwest.  

One of the very first "horseless carriages” (automobiles) made in the United States was the "Pioneer” by Elwood Haynes, who took the car for its first public drive near Kokomo, Indiana in 1894. Before Detroit took over the automobile industry, cars were produced in 40 cities across Indiana. The biggest Indiana car company was Studebaker, founded in 1901.  

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built in 1909 as a testing ground for new cars, but Indiana car companies quickly realized that public automobile races would boost sales. The original track surface was crushed stone and tar, but when that proved too slick, it was replaced with more than 3 million paving bricks, earning the 2.5-mile track its nickname, “the Brickyard.” Equipped to seat an audience of more than 250,000, the Speedway is the world’s largest spectator sporting arena. 

The very first Indianapolis 500 was run on Memorial Day 1911 and the winner drove a Marmon Wasp, a sports car made in Indianapolis. Another top performer was the Stutz Bearcat, also made in Indianapolis by a company founded by the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab.  

Basketball wasn’t invented in Indiana, but the Hoosier state is synonymous with the game. In 1925, James Naismith—who invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891—commented, “Basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport.” 

In the early 1900s, high school basketball became the most popular sport in Indiana with 450 schools competing for the state title. The very first Indiana high school boys basketball tournament was held in 1911, the same year as the inaugural Indianapolis 500.  

The movie Hoosiers is based on the real-life story of an underdog team from rural Milan High School that defeated much larger Muncie Central High School with a last-second shot to win the state championship in 1954. The event is known throughout Indiana as the “Milan Miracle.”

Date of Statehood: December 11, 1816

Capital: Indianapolis

Population: 6,785,528 (2020)

Size: 36,417 square miles

Nickname(s): Hoosier State

Motto: The Crossroads of America

Tree: Tulip

Flower: Peony

Bird: Cardinal