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.

Gen. Henry Hamilton and his British Redcoats passed through on their way from Detroit to retake Vincennes in 1778.

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.

Negotiators representing the US Government and the Miami Nation met at the Forks between 1833 and 1840
to work out three treaties. In 1846, the Miami, by then the last tribe in Indiana, left the Wabash Valley for Kansas Territory.

 Boisterous Irish workmen pushed the Wabash and Erie Canal past the Forks in 1836, and the canal brought settlers from the eastern US to farm the land being given up by the Indians. The Miami boarded canal boats at the Forks when they went west in 1846.

The canal also brought a new wave of European settlers to the region. The log cabin of Joseph and Margaret Nuck is preserved at the Forks of the Wabash, along with other historic buildings and structures from this era.