Indigenous Peoples and Early Settlement

Example projectile points from Indiana Dunes National Park. Ages range from ~10,000 years ago (l) to the historic period (b).

NPS

Indigenous Peoples

The Indiana Dunes area has been inhabited by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, with archaeological evidence showing human activity dating back approximately 10,500 years. This Paleo-Indian period involved small, mobile hunter-gatherer groups who utilized the lakeshore’s freshwater, plant life, and animal resources. As the climate and ecology shifted, these groups adapted their lifestyles accordingly. In the Archaic period (10,000 to 2,000 years ago), communities became more settled, and their tool use and regional trade networks expanded. This period is noted for a hunter-gatherer economy with increasing sedentism, ceremonial practices, and trade with distant regions. During the Woodland period (about 2,000 years ago to 500 years ago), Indigenous peoples established semi-permanent settlements and engaged in early agriculture, cultivating crops such as corn. This period saw the emergence of more complex social structures, long-distance trade, and mound-building for ceremonial purposes.

The arrival of European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries brought significant disruptions, introducing new goods and diseases, which, along with ensuing conflicts and land dispossession, reshaped Indigenous lives in the region.

The Miami and Potawatomi Tribes

By the late 1600s, the Miami tribe was the principal Indigenous group near southern Lake Michigan, including the St. Joseph River valley. However, by the early 1700s, the Miami faced significant pressure to relocate due to Iroquois expansion and conflicts driven by the fur trade. The Iroquois, armed with European weapons, sought to control hunting grounds in the region, pushing the Miami southward along the Wabash and Maumee Rivers. Following the Iroquois retreat, the Potawatomi moved into the southern Lake Michigan region, solidifying control over former Miami territories by the mid-1700s. As a result, the Potawatomi became the dominant tribe along the southern shores of Lake Michigan, with over 30 documented settlements by the late 18th century. By 1820, they occupied most of northern Indiana and Illinois as well as areas along the lake.

 

Map of northern Indiana showing numerated sections representing Indigenous land cessions.

C. C. Royce | Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by those in the State of Indiana | Smithsonian Institution - Bureau of Ethnology | 1881

Historic Era

Colonial and American Expansion

The French had the earliest historic European presence in today's Indiana Dunes National Park, with exploration first reported from 1675 – 1679. However, the first fur trade post, also French, was not founded until the 1750s. During the initial years of exploration (1634-1717), Europeans in the Great Lakes area included explorers, soldiers, priests, traders, and settlers. In 1689, Jesuits established the St. Joseph Mission near present day Niles, Michigan, near the juncture of the St. Joseph River & Kankakee River portage and the Great Sauk Trail, which would develop into Fort St. Joseph, a hub of the Great Lakes fur trade from 1691-1781. A small French-era outpost known as "Petite Fort" was reputedly established in what is now Indiana Dunes State Park during the 1750s, although historical evidence for its presence is very limited and no archeological evidence has been confirmed.

Though French presence in the area virtually ceased by the late 1700s, the Potawatomi continued to strengthen their connections with English colonial powers throughout much of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Relations between Europeans and native groups were primarily based on the fur trade, which the European governments used as a bargaining tool to control alliances with and between native groups. Both the Potawatomi and Miami were sporadically involved in the various conflicts between French and British interests during the second half of the 18th century. Conflicts amplified with the American Revolution and the increased westward expansion of the United States, which the Potawatomi resisted. The War of 1812 found the Potawatomi fighting on the side of the English in opposition to the United States.

President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 accelerated the U.S. Government's mission to acquire Indigenous lands east of the Mississippi River. Both the Miami and Potawatomi ceded lands through treaties in the early 1800s, but resistance continued until the U.S. forcibly removed these tribes to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma during the mid-19th century. While large portions of the tribes were moved to the Plains, scattered Potawatomi remain in the southern Lake Michigan area, including a small group of families living in southern Michigan on a small amount of tribal land. In addition, many Miami live in cities in Indiana, including Peru, Fort Wayne, and South Bend.

 

Map of the Indigenous Trails and Villages of the Calumet Area of Indiana and Illinois around 1830, also showing some modern names of the municipalities that arose at trail junctions.

K. J. Schoon, 2002. Revised from Meyer, 1954.
Sources: Blake, 1927, Knotts, 1929, Patterson, 1934, Meyer, 1954, Moore, 1959, and Scharf, 1903.

Euro-American Settlement and Travel Along the Lakeshore

Non-native exploration and use of the area appears to have maintained a consistent but non-intensive pace during the 17th and 18th centuries. American use of the Indiana Dunes area during the early 19th century followed this low-intensity pattern; early surveys and travelers’ journals from the 1820s and 1830s note that Europeans had “as yet, left only a slight mark on the surroundings”. Low-intensity use of the area south of Lake Michigan is largely tied to topography. The Kankakee marsh to the south of the Valparaiso Moraine and the Black Swamp to the east in Ohio, impeded traffic to Indiana Dunes from those directions. In addition, the high, long dune ridges within Indiana Dunes are interspersed with low-lying wetlands. The east-west running ridges comprised the only feasible inland travel routes. Early historic travel routes across the region ran exclusively in an east-west direction; the only north-south trails were merely connections between the major east-west routes. The few passable routes were considered very difficult to traverse, limiting European use of the area. While industrial and residential development transformed the Chicago area to the west and Detroit and smaller communities to the east, the Indiana Dunes area remained relatively unchanged well into the 19th century.

This topography of raised beach ridges interspersed with low-lying marshes limited potential travel routes. In fact, footpaths established by indigenous groups in prehistory and early historic times transitioned naturally into routes used by Native and European Americans between trading posts (Fort Dearborn, the site of the future Chicago was established in 1803). These trails were also used by settlers moving into and through the area. These trails would later develop into roads as transportation routes became established between Detroit and Chicago. The shore of southern Lake Michigan served as one of the easiest routes between Chicago (i.e., Fort Dearborn) and Detroit during the early 19th century. When well compacted by wave action, the beach sands served as an unobstructed and relatively easy route around the Lake. However, travel conditions varied greatly according to the weather. Time required to travel this route could vary from hours to days.

The Great Sauk Trail served as another passage through the region surrounding the head of Lake Michigan. Part of a trail system that traverses the United States, the Sauk runs as far west as Omaha, Nebraska, where it splits into sections of the Santa Fe and Oregon trails. The section of this trail running near the Indiana Dunes received its name from the Sauk and Fox, who traveled annually from Rock Island, Illinois, to Detroit to receive government annuity payments. Today this route hosts a section of US Highway 20. The Calumet and Tolleston beach ridges also bear historic trails with continuous use into modern times. A route tracing a small bench on the north side of the Calumet Dune ridge became the first stage coach thoroughfare in 1831, and later, the path of US Highway 12 when paved in early 1920s.

 

This log structure, part of the Bailly Homestead, was reportedly used as a storehouse for local Potawatomi. Each year, Potawatomi moved south to spend the winter along the vast marshes of the Kankakee River before returning the region in the spring.

NPS / Joseph Gruzalski

Rising Land Use

The 1830s began the first large wave of Euro-American settlement in the region; following the Black Hawk War of 1832 and final land cession treaties with local tribes. By 1840 the population of Porter County was over 2,000. Meyer (1956) documented the addition of gristmills, sawmills, taverns, pioneer-built spurs added to traditional roadways, and platted (if never realized) towns throughout the southern Lake Michigan area.

During the mid 1800s farmers began installing drainage ditches that changed the landscape drastically and in 1852 the Michigan Southern and Central Railroads were completed. Giant tulip trees and white pines were cut for lumber. These developments contributed to an increasing flow of people and goods through northwest Indiana, thereby opening the region surrounding the National Park area to more use and increased settlement.

Early Development of the Indiana Dunes: 1870s-1910s

 

Source: An Archeological Overview and Assessment of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Indiana | Dawn Bringelson and Jay T. Sturdevant | National Park Service | Midwest Archeological Center Technical Report No. 97 | 2007