BICENT ENNI AL TOUR OF THE HO OSIER STATE ties into Lake Erie. Only a short portage connects this important waterway with the headwaters of the Wabash River. The all of the courthouse clocks run and are French, soldiers and missionaries rather accurate. An added special amenity of the than colonists and farmers, located there as courthouse in Paoli was a water fo untain early as 1722. Other fo rts were located at donated by the ladies of the Wo man's Ouiatenon, near Lafayette, and Vincennes, Christian Te mperance Union to the men which is also the site of the earliest Roman of Orange County. Catholic church in Indiana. The remnants When I set about trying to organize of a "French cemetery" are located next to what I had fo und, I was pleased to dis­ the Old Cathedral, erected on the site of cover that all the major periods into which that first church. historians have divided the state's history Following France's displacement in as a way to interpret that history are rep­ the West by the English (as a result of the resented by places and various structures French and Indian War), the English were throughout the state. For the "pre-historic" themselves displaced during the American period, there are the Angel Mounds near Revolutionary War, an event memorialized Evansville, the Mounds State Park near in Indiana at the sublime George Rogers Anderson, and, in a new attraction opened Clark Memorial. I like to point out that since my tour, the Falls of the Ohio State there are countless markers, statues, and Park. monuments to the Wa r fo r Independence The first Europeans to reach that part up and down the Atlantic Coast, but there Clockwise from Above, Left:Fort Ouiatenon of North America that has come to be is only one such American Revolutionary in Tippecanoe County, Indiana; Mounds State known as Indiana were the French, who War remembrance in the We st, and it is Park in Anderson; and a replica of one of the established three fo rts there along what in Vincennes. There are five murals inside historic fo rts of Fort Wayne. became the great Wabash River trade the building that encapsulate the story of route. Their earliest structure, Fort Miami, Clark's capture of Fort Sackville that ended at the site later known as Fort Wayne, with General Henry Hamilton's surrender was situated near the head of that trade to Clark, the lowering of the English flag, route, where like Pittsburgh on a larger and the elevation of the American flag over scale two rivers converge to fo rm a third. this entryway to the vast American West. In Fort Wayne's case, the Saint Marys and Indiana's territorial period, which the Saint Joseph rivers flowtogether to extended from the time of the Northwest create the Maumee River, which emp- Ordinance in 1787 until Indiana state- TRACES I Summer 2011 I 41 .