The Forks of the Wabash has been a crossroads and stopping place for over 10,000 years.

It is the southern end of the Long Portage,  which was one of three principal portages between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watershed.

The Forks has seen nomad hunters on the trail of the herds of bison and mammoths which moved across the area after the last glacier.

Native Americans camped here for millennia.
The Miami Indians reentered this area in the late 1600s,
and by 1700 had laid claim to the entire Wabash Valley.

When the first French explorers entered Indiana in the 1760s,
all of Indiana and the western half of Ohio were regarded as the home territory
of the Miami and their Algonquian cousins - the Delaware, Kickapoo, Shawnee Potawatami and others.

The earliest Europeans to come here were traders, and since the Miami were also traders,
the two cultures coexisted more or less comfortably for about a century.

But as more and more settlers came West, conflicts developed.

The Indians, under the leadership of the Miami War Chief Little Turtle,
won several notable battles, but they were decisively defeated by Anthony Wayne in 1794.
During the next fifty years the Miami and their fellow Algonquians gradually negotiated away all their land.

In 1846, the Miami, by then the last tribe in Indiana, left the Wabash Valley for Kansas Territory.