The 1830s and 40s were a tumultuous time here at the Forks.  The Treaty of Greenville (1795) removed the Fort Wayne area from the control of the Miami, and white entrepreneurs and settlers began moving into northeastern Indiana soon after the Treaty was signed.

The Fort Wayne area (called Kekionga by the Miami) had been the focal point of Miami life for over a century, and tensions between the newcomers and the settled Miami residents were inevitable.  Chief Richardville moved the Miami Council House to the Forks in 1831 in an effort to put some distance between his people and the flood of newcomers entering the Fort Wayne area, but the flood was already moving down the Wabash River valley.  

By the mid-1830s, Huntington was beginning to become a town, and by the mid-1840s, 30 to 40 settler families were arriving in the Wabash valley every day. The Native Americans living at the Forks were following centuries-old customs and traditions, hunting, foraging or growing all the food they needed, living in small but efficient dwellings.  They bartered for what they could not produce themselves, and they made good use of what they found in their environment to live comfortably.

The incoming settlers brought a whole new way of life with them.  They cleared large areas so they could cultivate big fields of crops.  They built homes, first of logs, then of sawed lumber and brick.  They drew well-defined property lines; they used money in economic exchanges; and they daily used products made hundreds or thousand of miles away.

The Forks of the Wabash was a place where two cultures met: the ancient and established culture of the Miami, a culture well adapted to living with the land; and the equally ancient and established culture of the arriving settlers, who believed the land was something to be wrestled with and subdued, not just lived on.

The Wabash and Erie Canal connected these two cultures. It brought in the new settlers, and it made farming economically viable by providing access to eastern markets.  And it finally transported the Miami away from their land west to Kansas Territory.

This is the story the new Historic Forks of the Wabash Interpretive Center tells, a story of conflict, adaptation, courage, cleverness, duplicity, goodness, power, friendship, and hard work.

It is a story that took place in a small town in Indiana, but a story that affected people as far away as Europe, and a story that was repeated many times in many places during the 1800s.  It is the story we want to tell you as you browse through our new exhibits or listen to the tales told by our interpreters.  Come and let us tell you our story.