What Clinton County and the State of Indiana and the United States themselves lack in age, you can see in the travel ways when you stand on the town square in Frankfort. The travel ways you are looking at in any direction are much, much older than Clinton County, the State of Indiana, and the United States. These travel ways were here long before surveyors put their gridding on the dirt and long before any wagons came into the area. The earth was crossed by travel ways even then, marking the passing of the natives who crossed in predetermined ways through the forests, prairies, and creek bottoms, because the earth was worn in those predetermined ways by the passing of the natives.
When the first settlers migrated into what would become Carroll and Clinton counties in the early 1800s, they did not enter an untracked wilderness. Rather, they entered an area where the wilderness was well known and well traversed. There were Native trails on the high and dry ridges running parallel with Wildcat Creek, leading on to the Wabash, and across the prairie openings in the west. These trails had evolved over several thousand years of logic—to avoid the low and wet areas, stay on the ridgelines where the walking was easier, and link the sugar groves, the hunting camps, the seasonal villages, and the river centers. The settlers themselves reported that the “best” or “most natural” spot to lay out a road was always the spot the Native travelers had picked out. The histories of the counties themselves, and in particular the Carroll County histories, frankly confess the truth. The first roads put through by the whites were Native roads, and the Delphi-Frankfort plank road, when built in 1849, simply followed the old, proven path through the ages between the two towns. There was no need for engineering, since the engineering had been accomplished by the Native travelers.
Frankfort was there because the territory and the trails overlapped. Long before anyone laid out a plat map, the site now encompassing the courthouse square was the confluence of several major roads. The most significant was the road running from the Wildcat Creek drainage area through the present Rossville and Delphi route, and then on across the Wabash River. This was the travel and trade route from interior seasonal hunting camps and on through the gathering areas on the banks of the Wabash, and Prophetstown in later times. There was, too, a road running through the area, leading from the homelands in the northern Miami and Wea tribes through the lands bordering the White River, and then on through the lower lands into the Ohio. This route still exists in the modern alignments of the highways, namely US-421, IN-39, and the straight-line ridge roads leading from Frankfort on through Kokomo and on toward Lebanon. Through the western and northwest territory, beyond Frankfort, there lay hunting grounds and prairie openings, where the Native family path-followers led from the trails blazed there by the elk, deer, and bison, whose roads came in on all angles, making Frankfort an inevitable resting spot long before it was the site of the government seat.
Archaeologists and historians concur that most of these routes were in use during the Middle Woodland period, circa the time of Christ and perhaps earlier. The first travelers would have included the Woodland and Hopewell peoples who camped seasonally near creeks, harvested nuts from the dense hardwood forests, and migrated through the ridges in family units. Later, during the 1000 to 1500 AD era, the Late Woodlands and the early Miami-ancients began traveling through these routes from organized settlements in the Wabash area and the interior hunting grounds. In the 1600s and 1700s, the Frankfort area was part of the vital homelands network of the Miamis and the Wea who employed these roads in interlinking villages, hunting grounds, peace negotiation sites, and trade routes. With the displacement and forced migrations due to war, a fresh set of tribes migrated through the same routes in the Frankfort region – the Shawnees, Kickapoos, Delawares, and Potawatomis, and tribes in mixed company traveling to the decision-making assembly points like Prophetstown.
These trails were well in place and well realized by the time the American settlers came. These trails took the best possible routes through the countryside, avoiding swamplands and making use of the high spots, and then the best possible ways across the creeks. Nor is it surprising that surveyors and roadmen changed these trails almost directly into roads. Some trails have been straightened over the years, but most remain in the turns and angles of the modern roads, set in deliberate refusal of the county grid.
These traces remain visible on the map today. Roads that sloped toward Delphi or the Wabash rather than aligning precisely with the square-mile grid reflect the Wildcat and Wabash corridor. Roadways running the length of the ridges, curving and bending with the lay of the earth, reflect the path hunting parties would take in order to avoid water and be visible on high ground. The cryptic lines on the map, roads cutting section lines at irregular angles, can represent either Native American roads or, on occasion, animal trails even older than the Native roads. Whose trails these were, in any case, cannot be determined, since there had been numerous peoples occupying the land over the millennia. These trails, in the first millennium AD, were used by the Woodland peoples who lived there and hunted, gathered, and seasonally camped by the creeks. These, in turn, began the transition to the Late Woodland peoples who began developing the early forms of settlements that would come to comprise the ancestors of the Miamis. By the mid-18th-century arrival of Europeans, the Miami and Wea peoples predominated, though Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Delaware peoples also migrated through the same paths in response to the shifting territorial demarks and the resultant pressures.
Well into the early 1800s, long after the signings and the removals, members of the Native tribes continued traveling through their tried and trusted paths in search of hunting, family visits, council meetings on the banks of the Wabash, and movement between the settlements. Eventually, the forced relocation and the violation and destruction of the treaties led to the abandonment of the Native communities in the Indianapolis area, except for the trails. The trails simply changed with the times and would become the basis for the early wagon roads, the county roads, and then the highways. The old trails were simply renamed. The story of Frankfort could easily begin at the setting of the first courthouse cornerstone or the initial mapping of the town. However, the earth keeps in mind much, much more. With each travel into town on a diagonally driven road, on a path skirting the ridgeline in avoidance of the lowest spots, on the crossing of a bridge where there has “always” been a crossing, the traveler traces routes determined by people whose names would not appear in the corresponding pages of the county atlases. The Indian trails are invisible on modern maps and have no markers. Yet they remain, beneath the blacktop, beneath the gravel, beneath our feet, retaining the traces of an older Indiana.