Two-Moon Journey: The Potawatomi Trail of Death

Peggy King Anderson

ene 2019 · Indiana Historical Society

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Two Moon Journey tells the story of a young Potawatomi Indian named Simu-quah and her family and friends who were forced from their village at Twin Lakes, near Rochester, Indiana, where they had lived for generations, to beyond the Mississippi River in Kansas. Historically the journey is known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Like the real Potawatomi, Simu-quah would live forever with the vision of her home and the rest of the Twin Lakes village being burnt to the ground by the soldiers as she took her first steps to a distant and frightening westward land. She experiences the heat and exhaustion of endless days of walking; helps nurse sick children and the elderly in a covered wagon that was ill-smelling, hot, and airless; sleeps beside strange streams and caves—and turns from hating the soldiers to seeing them as people. In Kansas, as she planted corn seeds she had saved from her Indiana home, she turns away from the bitterness of removal and finds forgiveness, the first step in the journey of her new life in Kansas.

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Peggy King Anderson is a published children’s author. Her book, The Fall of the Red Star (coauthored by Helen Szablya, 1996, 2001) was featured on Children’s Book TV. Anderson is also the author or contributor to four other published books for children: Coming Home (1988), A Horse’s Tale (1989), Safe At Home (1992), and First Day Blues (1992). Anderson frequently writes for children and adult magazines. Her story, “The Long March,” about the 1838 Potawatomi Trail of Death appeared in Highlights for Children in fall 2002. Anderson has taught creative writing to adults for more than twenty years in community college classes and at writing conferences. She also teaches creative writing in K–12 schools on a contract basis. Anderson’s husband was an Indiana Potawatomi and her five children appear on the tribal rolls.