Trail of Death: The Potawatomi Removal of 1838

Every September morning the people could remember, the thud of a pestle in a walnut-log mortar carried across the Yellow River. In 1832 it still did. Smoke rose straight from the bark roofs of the Potawatomi villages in northern Indiana, a boy scraped a raccoon hide with a mussel shell the way his uncle had shown him, and the year ran on its old round: maple sugar in February, corn in April, the green corn feast in August, furs when the nights turned cold. The people called themselves Neshnabé, the true people, and Bodéwadmi, keepers of the fire.

But the traders' credit books were filling, and treaty by treaty, from the council at Chicago in 1833 on, the land was signed away. In September 1838 Indiana militia forced more than eight hundred Potawatomi out of their homes and onto the road west. They were marched for two months to the Osage River country in what is now Kansas, and more than forty died on the way, many of them children.

From there the wagons roll on to a winter arrival, and the story stays with the survivors: the mission schools, the struggle over land in Kansas, the long memory of the march, and the road reclaimed by their descendants.

In the new country, they planted corn again.