isa-normaladvance-1913-00237

Description:	THE NORMAL ADVANCE237Snbtana—<^ne Jmnbreb gears 9goHOSTILITIES OX THE FRONTIER.T N the Indiana Territory House Records or--- curs the following entry for February, 11,1813: Whereas, the hostile disposition of theIndians, and the danger to which the villageof Vincennes is thereby subjected, and for thepreservation of the public acts and the recordsof the territory in this, our perilous situation,make it necessary that the seat of governmentof the territory should be removed to a placewhere the archives of the state and the claimsof individuals should not be endangered.1A few days after the House adopted the preamble above, together with a resolution toremove the capital from Vincennes, the Western- Sun at Vincennes published the following:It again becomes our duty to record the melancholy news of the murder of three more of ourfellow citizens by the Indians. * * Inthe course of the present week there has notbeen less than 15 or 20 horses stolen from theneighborhood.It had been just fifty years since KingGeorge III issued a proclamation forbiddinghis subjects in America to cross the ridge of theAlleghanies, to enter the fertile valleys beyond.In those fifty years the frontier line of whitesettlement had been transposed. The tide ofsettlers had reached the mountain passes, andhad flowed through these gateways to Tennessee and Kentucky. Again the tide had setin across the Ohio and down this river untilthe whole north bank of the river was occupiedby white settlements. Time and again thewhites had met the red men around the councilfires and had impelled them to barter awaytheir lands. Yet not always by peaceful methods, for the Indians fought every inch of theway, trying to save their hunting grounds,their fishing brooks, and their plots of growing corn. This is a romantic period, and fullof heroic adventure. The names of DanielBoone, Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel, andscores of others take similar places in the earlyhistory of the trans-Allegheny region that thename of Miles Standish fills in the history ofPlymouth, or that of Romulus in the history ofRome. The net results of the period is thatthe frontier line advanced north from theOhio, and in 1813 the Indians were again taking their stand against the whites.Indiana had grown from one county withtwo settlements in 1800 to a territory with arepresentative government and ten counties in1813. (See map.) The settlements had arranged themselves in the form of a crescent,resting upon the Ohio, the eastern tip beingnear the site of Richmond, and the western tipnear the site of Terre Haute. Kentuckians hadbeen crossing the Ohio into the territory andother Southerners had found their waythrough Cumberland Gap and down the Ohioto seek their fortunes in the land of promise.Pennsylvania had joined the tide driftingdown the Ohio, and other settlers from thenew state of Ohio had helped to settle up theWhitewater basin. Settlements were pushingtoward the interior when the Indian hostilities in 1811 brought a halt to the advance ofthe frontier line wdiich began so decidedly following the land sales in 1806 and 1807.TECUMTHA.There wrere various reasons wThy Tecumthawent on the warpath in 1811, and the most ofthese causes operated in instigating the Indians against the settlers in Indiana from1812-1815. There had been little, if any, openhostilities toward the whites since the treaty^Western Sun, March 20, 1813.
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/34682
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

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