The Attempted Potawatomi Removal of 1839

Abstract

In 1838, John C. Tipton and an armed militia forcibly gathered up more than 800 Potawatomi from their homes and farms in northern Indiana and marched them to Kansas. Over the course of the forced removal, more than forty Native Americans, mostly children and elderly men and women, died. But not all the northern Indiana Potawatomi were removed—many escaped before the forced march and some during it. The federal Office of Indian Affairs, determined to finish the job they had started, planned for another Potawatomi removal in 1839 under the direction of Indian agent and militia general Samuel Milroy and William Polke, one of the conductors of the 1838 removal. Letters between Milroy and Polke reveal why the 1839 removal failed: resistance from many of the Potawatomi; lengthy and poor planning by Milroy and the federal government, which delayed the removal until late in the year; the interference of white traders; and, most decisively, the suspension of specie payment by Indiana banks, which left the planned removal unfunded.