Excerpt from Early Indiana Trails and Surveys Indian road at what is now Gosport and one between Cataract and Santa Fe. Ten miles east of Bloomington he crossed an Indian trail running north and south.5 South of White river, near Brownstown, he recorded another Indian road, going east and west; west perhaps to the old Delaware camp at the forks of White river. There was an army crossing at the mouth of Raccoon creek 7 the trail crossed the Wabash there and followed up the right hand or west bank of the river. This fact made the mouth of Raccoon creek prominent enough to be a beginning point of the Harrison Purchase,8 in 1809. On this ten o'clock line there was an Indian trail between what is now Dana and Hillsdale.9 Since the line ran in a southeasterly direction, the traces must have crossed it nearly at right angles, or the surveyor would not have recorded them. Probably all led toward Ft. Wayne and Vincennes.10 The survey of this line was not pleasing to Tecumseh, and he so intimated to the United States government, August 10, 1810, at Vincennes.11 He was very angry at the chiefs who touched the quill, as the Indians called signing a treaty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Description of the early trails and surveys of Indiana.

This original study tells the story of the Illinois Country, a collection of French villages that straddled the Mississippi River for nearly a century before it was divided by the treaties that ended the Seven Years' War in the early 1760s. Spain acquired the territory on the west side of the river and Great Britain the territory on the east. After the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the entire region was controlled by the United States, and the white inhabitants were transformed from subjects to citizens. By 1825, Indian claims to the land that had become the states of Illinois and Missouri were nearly all extinguished, and most of the Indians had moved west. John Reda focuses on the people behind the Illinois Country's transformation from a society based on the fur trade between Europeans, Indians, and mixed-race (métis) peoples to one based on the commodification of land and the development of commercial agriculture. Many of these people were white and became active participants in the development of local, state, and federal governmental institutions. But many were Indian or métis people who lost both their lands and livelihoods, or black people who arrived—and remained—in bondage. In From Furs to Farms, Reda rewrites early national American history to include the specific people and places that make the period far more complex and compelling than what is depicted in the standard narrative. This fascinating work will interest historians, students, and general readers of US history and Midwestern studies.

Most history concentrates on the broad sweep of events, battles and political decisions, economic advance or decline, landmark issues and events, and the people who lived and made these events tend to be lost in the big picture. Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Jean-Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes; George Croghan, the ultimate frontier entrepreneur; the world as seen by George Rogers Clark; Josiah Hamar and John Francis Hamtramck; Little Turtle; Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison and William Henry Harrison; Tenskwatawa; Jonathan Jennings; Calvin Fletcher; and many others. Focusing his account on these and other representative individuals, Cayton retells the story of Indiana's settlement in a human and compelling narrative which makes the experience of exploration and settlement real and exciting. Here is a book that will appeal to the general reader and scholar alike while going a long way to reinfusing our understanding of history and the historical process with the breath of life itself.

Vols. for 1980- issued in three parts: Series, Authors, and Titles.

Recounts the author's pioneer boyhood in Marion County, Indiana.