The Long March

In 1838 the Potawatomi Indians were forced to leave their homelands and move west.

Equa-Ke-Sec tried to calm her fears as the soldier stood in the clearing, ordering her family to leave their home. Even though she was a child, she was about to begin the longest walk of her life, a journey of more than six hundred miles.

Why was this happening?

Thousands of settlers from the east were beginning to move farther west, and they wanted land. President Andrew Jackson had just approved the Indian Removal Act, which called for resettling Native Americans on land west of the Mississippi River. Over the next several years, many tribes, including the Potawatomi, were forced to leave their homelands. 

On that hot September day in 1838, soldiers came to the beautiful Niles Valley in Michigan where Equa-Ke-Sec lived with her mother, father, sister, and other tribal members. The soldiers gave them fifteen minutes to collect what they could carry on their backs and leave. Equa-Ke-Sec and her family were sad and frightened. They were told that if they didn’t hurry, their village would be burned.

Some of the soldiers felt bad about what was being done to the Potawatomi, but others pushed the people along with the butts of their rifles. By the second night of their journey, Equa-Ke-Sec was more tired than she had ever been before.

The soldiers stopped at a place called Mud Creek. Equa-Ke-Sec missed the great lake her family had lived by in Michigan. For hundreds of years, her family had fished for trout in the lake and in the nearby St. Joseph River.

But here there was no sound of running water. Mud Creek was only a trickle, barely enough to quench her thirst.

The soldiers divided the Potawatomi into small groups and gave each a portion of cornmeal. Equa-Ke-Sec’s mother stirred this into boiling water to make a kind of mush for dinner. Equa-Ke-Sec was so tired she could barely eat.

By the next day many children and some of the older people were too sick to walk. They were put into baggage wagons and carried along. Equa-Ke-Sec sometimes felt ill, but she was determined not to go into the sick wagon. The wagons were crowded, stuffy, and smelly — the cloth covering held in the heat. And she could hardly bear the sight of the jail wagon where the tribal chiefs were forced to ride. It was almost like a cage.

They passed through many towns on their journey. Sometimes the townspeople were kind to them. In Rochester, Indiana, people made hoecakes, or corn pancakes, for the hungry Potawatomi. And in Jacksonville, Illinois, the town band played, and the mayor came out to give candy to Equa-Ke-Sec and the other children.

But as the journey continued, the drought that had dried up Mud Creek got worse. Sometimes when the soldiers stopped for the night, Equa-Ke-Sec could not quench her thirst at all. The only water was from stagnant ponds or muddy creeks, which even the horses refused to drink.

Finally, the weather changed. One day as she walked along, it began to pour. Equa-Ke-Sec held her face up to the rain, eagerly drinking fresh cool drops of water.

By now it was late October, and the weather quickly grew colder. One day it snowed. Many of the people were barefoot, their moccasins worn through from the long march. It was almost a week before the soldiers could get shoes for the shivering, footsore tribe.

Finally, on November 4, 1838, after more than six hundred miles of hard travel, Equa-Ke-Sec and her tribe reached Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, but a short time later moved to their final destination, Sugar Creek. They arrived during a snowstorm. Their friends, the Osage Indians, didn’t have enough shelter for them. Equa-Ke-Sec’s family hung animal skins from the stone banks along Sugar Creek and huddled under them to stay warm.

Equa-Ke-Sec had survived the long march. That year she and her sister went to school at the Sugar Creek Mission. Equa-Ke-Sec was now called Theresa Slavin, but she did not forget what had happened. When she grew up, married, and had her own daughter, she told her about the long sad journey of their tribe. Because so many people had died along the way, the Potawatomi called it the Trail of Death.

The story was passed on from mother to child for three generations. Finally, a young girl named Virginia was told the story by her mother. Virginia Pearl, CSJ, a Catholic sister, is the great-granddaughter of Equa-Ke-Sec and a member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi in Oklahoma. She tells Equa-Ke-Sec’s story whenever she has the chance. It is her hope that people will always remember that long-ago journey so that such a sad thing will never happen again.

“It helps me to remember Equa-Ke-Sec’s courage when hard things happen to me,” Sister Pearl says. “May her story help you have courage when anything hard happens to you on your journey.”