FEATURE ARTICLE
How It All Began: A History of the Town
Chief Shipshewana and
the Potawatomi Indians
In the early 1830’s the first white settlers of the present Newbury Township found this area to be inhabited by semi-nomadic tribes of North American Indians. A small band of Potawatomi Indians had chosen the area of the present Shipshewana Lake as the site for their campgrounds. The lake and nearby swamps and woodlands were sources of their livelihood. The chief of this small band of Indians was Shipshewana.
In 1803, President Jefferson doubled the size of the United States when he bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. Along with the scarcely populated Northwest Territory, the United States Congress now was endowed with an immense domain, plus huge war debts from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. To provide the much-needed money to pay these debts, the sale of these western lands became a solution. How to acquire the titles to the millions of Indian lands was the problem. The government policy concerning the Indians in the Northwest Territory was to eventually extinguish any land claims by repeated negotiated treaties, squeezing the Indians into smaller and smaller areas and eventually forcing them onto reservations west of the Mississippi River.
One of the most infamous acts of injustice by the United States government was the forced march of nearly 1,000 Potawatomi men, women,
and children from northern Indiana to the Osage River in Kansas. A militia of a hundred volunteers was raised, and 876 unsuspecting Potawatomi Indians were collected. They were force-marched with drawn guns and bayonets for 665 miles in 61 days in the heat and dust of autumn. They left Indiana on September 4 and arrived in Kansas on November 4, 1838. A review of the Rolls of Indians taken for September 4, 1838, on what was come to be known as the Trail of Death contained the name “Shuw-a-aw-no”, which could be the phonetic spelling for Chief Shipshewana. It is most probable that the Chief’s little band of Potawatomi Indians had been on this infamous Death March. On a monument dedicated to Chief Shipshewana at Lake Shipshewana is inscribed the following, “The Chief was removed from this reservation September 4, 1838, and was escorted to Kansas by a company of soldiers. He returned in 1839 and died in 1841.”
(This article is a condensed version of one written by Rachel Murray Celmer in a Centennial book entitled A PATCHWORK SAMPLER edited by Julie Wolfe, 1989.)
And Then The Settlers Came
In 1888 the first train went through SHIPSHEWANA, and the town had its beginning. In the fall of 1888, with the building of the railroad, the civil engineer, J. J. Burns, planned the town free of charge. The first building erected was the depot, in fall of 1888, and the first residence was erected in 1889 and occupied by Mr. Stowe, the railroad agent. The first train passed through Shipshewana on December 25, 1888 from Goshen to Battle Creek. The year 1889 was one of the big building years in the history of the town.