Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

If this title makes you think I have reneged on my word not to discuss the recent election in public, never fear. Instead, read on.

I had a sad experience yesterday when my friend, Carol, and I visited the Tippecanoe Battlefield just outside Lafayette, Indiana. We’d met in the town to stay in a B&B for a grown-up girls’ sleepover. The afternoon was brisk but bright, and we decided to immerse ourselves in local history. So we drove to where a decisive battle was waged on November 8, 1811. Ironically, we arrived one day –and almost two hundred years — after that ominous anniversary.

We didn’t know a thing about the Battle of Tippecanoe; and both of us thought it was important for the Civil War. Which just goes to show how uninformed two college graduates can be. Instead, what we learned was that the Battle of Tippecanoe was a major factor in the approaching War of 1812.

Briefly, Indiana was not part of the Union in those days; and the British in the area attempted to incite the local Indian population again the Americans who were moving west and settling in the region. Without the British urgings, the Indians led by Tecumseh and his brother, The Prophet, were relatively willing to live side by side with the new settlers. But the British convinced them otherwise.

On the morning of November 8, 1911, approximately nine hundred military led by General Benjamin Henry Harrison attacked an equal number of Indians before they could attack the militia. In the end, the Indians were decimated.

Indians were decimated in many places in those days; and that’s what was sad about this battleground. As we walked through autumn leaves and read the monuments to the military fallen, there was no acknowledgement of what the Indians had suffered or lost. There was only the victor’s point of view. This probably isn’t unusual, but it seemed lopsided since Tecumseh and his tribe had settled the Wabash Valley long before the settlers and soldiers came. They had lived in peace until the soldiers showed up.

It made me wonder if anything has changed since then.