Wea and Miami Indians lived in peace and harmony on land bordering the Wabash River and Raccoon and Sugar creeks long before Parke County was carved out of the vast Louisiana Purchase territory.

In the 1700s, lakes and rivers with their connecting portages were the only highways. The French, the first explorers, traveled by canoe to trade with the Native Americans in this territory. They monopolized the fur trade and exerted their influence over the friendly Native Americans.

Native Americans traded prime beaver, fox, raccoon, mink and muskrat pelts to the French for blankets, woven cloth, glass beads and other baubles.

The territory of Indiana was organized by William Henry Harrison in 1800. After Harrison was appointed governor, he made treaties with the Native Americans for possession of the lands. In September of 1809, Harrison met with chiefs at Fort Wayne. He made a treaty then for all the lands south of a line from a certain point on the White River to the mouth of Big Raccoon Creek in Parke County. This is known as the "Ten O'Clock Line."

The treaty was ratified by the Wea and other tribes Oct. 26, 1809. The Wabash Valley was open to settlement the next year.

Another treaty signed by the Wea tribe Oct. 2, 1818, the treaty of St. Mary's ceded all of their lands north of the Ten O'Clock Line except the Sugar Creek Reserve, which the Wea and the Miami were to possess until the United States "should make other permanent provision."

The reservation ran up and down the Wabash River from the mouth of Sugar Creek to the mouth of Big Raccoon Creek and was about seven miles wide. Reserve Township, where the town of Montezuma is located, now embraces most of the territory.

Brenda Maconaquah Lindley of Lafayette, descendant of two Wea chiefs, proudly speaks of her family ties to Parke and Vigo counties. She said her great-great-great-great grandfather Jocco was chief of a Wea settlement, Old Orchard Town Village, located in what is now about the center of Terre Haute. Jocco made arrangement for his sister Me-Chin-Quam-E-Sha Godfroy to marry Ambrose Dagenette, a Frenchman, she said.

The couple's son, born Dec. 25, 1779, was named Christmas. He and his parents lived in a village south of Montezuma. Christmas was influenced by Catholic missionaries and became a Christian. He married Mary Ann Issacs in a ceremony solemnized by the Rev. Isaac McCoy on Feb. 16, 1819.

This union was the first Christian marriage performed in Parke County.

Christmas and his sister, Mary Dagenette Shields, were each granted one section of land near Armiesburg in Parke County for their services to the white settlers as interpreters and peacemakers.

The land could not be transferred except to their heirs without the consent of the president of the United States.

When the white man first established a settlement in Parke County in 1816, the Native Americans had relinquished their claims, and all except a few stragglers on the reservations had departed never to return. Christmas was the last of the Wea in the county.

The U.S. government forced the removal of all Native Americans -- Wea, Miami and others who might have made their way into this territory-- in 1846.

"It was in 1846 that Christmas, now chief of the remaining remnant band of 350 Wea people, took them on their pitiful journey west," Lindley said. "They finally arrived in Kansas City after more than 100 of them died on the removal trip."

Christmas died two years later in Coldwater Grove, Kan. Before he died, he donated land and established a Catholic Cemetery near Armiesburg.

The Miami were not driven out of Parke County by tribes of their own race, but by the white man to whom they yielded peaceably, but reluctantly, by treaty and by purchase, says an account written in the Combined 1874 & 1908 Name and Index of Parke County, Indiana.

"The last Miami seen in the vicinity was a weary old man who in 1856 trudged through on his way from Washington looking with an eye of sad curiosity on the changes in the land where he had spent his boyhood," said H.W. Beckwith in his 1880 edition of "The History of Parke and Vigo Counties."

"Thus passed away victims of white man's greed, their own intemperance and the law of nature, our red predecessors."

Some part-bloods passed as whites and for many years kept their Native American heritage a secret. Now, without fear of retribution, they celebrate their heritage. The Native Americans are returning to Montezuma to share their history and culture with all who embrace diversity.

Information for this article was gleaned from: "Portrait & Biographical Record of Montgomery, Park and Fountain Counties," published in 1893; "History of Parke and Vigo Counties" by H.W. Beckwith, published 1880; "Archeological & Historic Survey of Parke County," published in 1927; and "A Parke County History" by C. Brown.