The 1838 Trail of Death: Potawatomi Forced Removal Through Kansas

The Indian Removal Act and the Potawatomi

The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson in May 1830, set the legal foundation for one of the most consequential — and devastating — policy campaigns in American history. The act authorized the President to negotiate treaties with Native nations east of the Mississippi River, exchanging their ancestral homelands for territory to the west. In practice, these negotiations were frequently coercive, and the removals that followed were often carried out by military force against peoples who had no meaningful choice in the matter.

The Potawatomi were among the most directly affected nations. A confederacy of Algonquian-speaking peoples who had historically occupied the Great Lakes region, the Potawatomi had been pushed steadily southward and eastward by earlier treaty-making. By the 1830s, significant Potawatomi communities remained in northern Indiana, including a substantial settlement of approximately 900 people around Twin Lakes — a group that had converted to Catholicism through the missionary work of priests associated with the Diocese of Vincennes.

These Twin Lakes Potawatomi were known among American settlers as the Prairie Potawatomi and had maintained generally peaceful relations with the surrounding Indiana communities. Their land, however, had become valuable. The Black Swamp region of northern Indiana was being cleared and settled rapidly, and American settlers viewed the Twin Lakes reservation as an obstacle to agricultural development. Pressure mounted on Indiana’s state government to remove the Potawatomi, and by 1838 that pressure had reached the point of action.

The Decision to Remove by Force

Treaty negotiations with the Twin Lakes Potawatomi had produced a series of land cession agreements through the 1830s, but a significant portion of the community refused to accept removal and remained on their lands. Chief Menominee, a Catholic convert and respected leader, was among those who resisted most vocally. He had previously declared, “The President does not know the truth. He does not know that your brother [Menominee] will not sell his lands.”

Indiana Governor David Wallace grew impatient with the pace of voluntary removal and requested federal military assistance to enforce the treaty terms. In the summer of 1838, Colonel Abel Pepper was assigned to oversee the removal. On August 30, 1838, a military force appeared at the Twin Lakes settlement and compelled the Potawatomi to begin assembling for the march westward.

The removal column that formed in early September 1838 consisted of approximately 859 people — men, women, children, and elders — along with a military escort, several wagons, and a small number of horses and oxen. Father Benjamin Petit, a young French-Canadian priest who had been assigned to the Twin Lakes mission since 1837, chose to accompany the column. His decision to march with his congregation would produce the most detailed eyewitness account of the journey.

Father Petit’s Journal

Benjamin Petit had arrived in Indiana in 1837 as a recently ordained priest, assigned to minister to the Catholic Potawatomi community at Twin Lakes. In the approximately one year he spent among them before the removal, he developed a deep familiarity with the community and a genuine concern for its members. When the march began, Petit walked alongside them and kept a journal that recorded daily conditions, deaths, the terrain of the route, and the human cost of the removal.

Petit’s journal is the primary historical document of the Trail of Death. It records the early deaths from disease — cholera and dysentery struck the column within days of departure — the increasing exhaustion of the marchers, the inadequacy of food and medical provisions, and the indifference or outright cruelty of some members of the military escort. He documented children dying in the arms of parents who had no means of burial beyond shallow roadside graves. He recorded the names of those who died, providing historical researchers with the most reliable accounting of the death toll.

The journal also preserves glimpses of the Potawatomi community’s internal life during the march — the prayers, the care of the sick, the maintenance of cultural practices under conditions of extreme duress. Petit’s account transforms what might otherwise be a bare statistical record of removal into a human document.

The Route Through Kansas

The removal column crossed Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri over the course of approximately seven weeks before entering present-day Kansas in late October 1838. By this point, the marchers had been on the road for nearly two months, autumn temperatures had begun to drop, and cumulative illness and exhaustion had weakened significant portions of the column.

The route entered Kansas from Missouri, passing through what is now Linn County before moving northward through Miami County toward the Osage River valley — the area designated as the new Potawatomi homeland. The landscape the column traversed in these final miles was the same tallgrass prairie region that would, two decades later, become a theater of the Bleeding Kansas conflict. In 1838, it was largely unsettled American territory, emptied by earlier removals of the Osage people who had previously occupied the Marais des Cygnes valley.

The Miami County portion of the route represented the final passage of a journey that had already claimed dozens of lives. Deaths continued to occur during this segment, and Father Petit’s journal documents the toll with the same meticulous grief that characterizes his earlier entries. The column was moving through what would become one of Kansas’s most historically significant counties toward a destination that offered survival but not restoration.

Arrival and Resettlement

The Trail of Death column arrived at the Osage River in present-day Kansas in late October 1838. The journey had covered approximately 660 miles and had lasted roughly two months. The Potawatomi were settled in a broad area along the Marais des Cygnes River in what is now Osage and Franklin counties in eastern Kansas — directly adjacent to the land that would eventually become Miami County.

Estimates of total deaths on the march range considerably, from a low of approximately 40 to higher figures that include deaths from illness in the weeks immediately following arrival. Most scholarly sources settle on approximately 40 to 60 deaths during the march itself, with additional deaths following settlement as the community recovered from the journey’s physical toll. Given a starting population of 859, even the lower estimates represent a mortality rate of roughly five percent over two months.

Father Petit remained with the community through the winter of 1838–1839 before returning to Indiana, where he died of illness in 1839 at the age of twenty-seven. His journal was preserved and eventually published, ensuring that the record he kept under difficult circumstances survived to inform later historical understanding.

The Prairie Band Potawatomi and Lasting Presence in Kansas

The Potawatomi who completed the Trail of Death and settled in eastern Kansas became the community historically known as the Prairie Band Potawatomi. Over the following decades, further treaty-making and land cessions reduced their territory, but a portion of the community retained land in Jackson County, Kansas, where the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation remains headquartered today.

The Citizen Potawatomi Nation, headquartered in Shawnee, Oklahoma, descended from a later group of Potawatomi who were removed from Kansas to Indian Territory in the 1860s — a second removal that echoed the patterns established in 1838. Both nations maintain historical memory of the Trail of Death as a foundational event in their community histories.

Commemoration and Historical Memory

Historical markers documenting the Trail of Death route have been placed at significant points in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. Researchers have worked to reconstruct the precise route using Father Petit’s journal, military records, and local county histories, allowing for a reasonably detailed reconstruction of the path through Miami County and adjacent areas.

The Trail of Death is situated within the broader history of Indian removal in the United States, a history that includes the more widely known Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838–1839), which occurred in the same year as the Potawatomi removal. The convergence of these events reflects the systematic scale of the federal removal program during the Jackson and Van Buren administrations.

For Miami County’s historical record, the Trail of Death represents the passage of a human community through terrain that would within two decades become settled farmland. The Potawatomi who crossed this ground in October 1838 left no permanent markers of their passage — that work has fallen to later historians and to the descendant communities who have insisted that the journey not be forgotten.