On September 17, 2011, we visited the Trail of Courage Living History Festival in Rochester, Indiana, with our three granddaughters, Sydney, Macy and Lindsay. I wanted to capture some of the feel of the people of the Rendezvous with my photos. In doing so, I hope to preserve for my granddaughters a moment of their time shadowed by a time from history.



Food purveyors and traditional craftsmen set up in wooden booths to demonstrate and sell their wares. Craftsmen also sell pre-1840 trade goods from blankets and in historic merchant tents, offering a variety of items from clothing and jewelry to knives and candles, everything needed to live in frontier days.



The Potawatomi Trail of Death was the forced removal by United States forces from September 4 to November 4, 1838, of 859 members of the Potawatomi nation from Twin Lakes near Plymouth, Indiana, to the location of present-day Osawatomie, Kansas, a distance of 660 miles. Typhoid fever and the stress of the forced march led to the death of over 40 individuals, mostly children. The Potawatomi Indians were marched single file down Rochester's Main Street September 5, 1838, on the forced removal. Since 1976 this festival has honored the American Indians and shown life before the removal when this was still Potawatomi Territory.