The story
Indigenous inhabitants
The first inhabitants in what is now Indiana were the Paleo-Indians, who arrived about 8000 BC after the melting of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. Divided into small groups, the Paleo-Indians were nomads who hunted large game such as mastodons. They created stone tools made out of chert by chipping, knapping and flaking.
The Archaic period between 5000 and 4000 BC saw the development of new ground-stone tools the building of earthwork mounds and middens, suggesting that settlements were becoming more permanent. The Woodland period began around 1500 BC marked by ceramics and pottery and the extended cultivation of plants eventually including crops such as corn and squash, and the development of long-term trade, notably by the Hopewell people.
The Mississippian culture emerged, lasting from 1000 AD until the 15th century, shortly before the arrival of Europeans. During this stage, people created large urban settlements designed according to their cosmology, with large mounds and plazas defining ceremonial and public spaces. The concentrated settlements depended on the agricultural surpluses. One such complex was the Angel Mounds. They had large public areas such as plazas and platform mounds, where leaders lived or conducted rituals. Mississippian civilization collapsed in Indiana during the mid-15th century for reasons that remain unclear.
The historic Native American tribes in the area at the time of European encounter spoke different languages of the Algonquian family. They included the Shawnee, Miami, and Illini. Refugee tribes from eastern regions, including the Delaware who settled in the White and Whitewater River Valleys, later joined them.
European exploration and sovereignty
In 1679, French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle was the first European to cross into Indiana after reaching present-day South Bend at the St. Joseph River. He was followed by French-Canadian fur traders exchanging blankets, jewelry, tools, whiskey and weapons with the Native Americans for skins.
By 1702, Sieur Juchereau established the first trading post near Vincennes. In 1715, Sieur de Vincennes built Fort Miami at Kekionga, now Fort Wayne. In 1717, another Canadian, Picote de Beletre, built Fort Ouiatenon on the Wabash River, to try to control Native American trade routes from Lake Erie to the Mississippi River.
In 1732, Sieur de Vincennes built a second fur trading post at Vincennes. In a period of a few years, British colonists arrived from the East and contended with the Canadians for control of the lucrative fur trade. Fighting between the French and British colonists occurred throughout the 1750s.
The Native American tribes of Indiana sided with the French Canadians during the French and Indian War (an episode of the Seven Years' War between the European great powers). With British victory in 1763, the French were forced to cede to the British crown all their lands in North America east of the Mississippi River and north and west of the colonies.
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Tribal resistance continued with Pontiac's Rebellion and the capture of forts Ouiatenon and Miami. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 designated the land west of the Appalachians as an Indian Reserve, and excluded British colonists from the area, which the Crown called "Indian Territory". The measure was one of the first significant areas of dispute between Britain and the colonies and would become a contributing factor leading to the American Revolution.
In 1775, the American Revolutionary War began as the colonists sought self-government and independence from the British. The majority of the fighting took place near the East Coast, but the Patriot military officer George Rogers Clark called for an army to help fight the British in the west. Clark's army won significant battles and took over Vincennes and Fort Sackville on February 25, 1779.
During the war, Clark managed to cut off British troops, who were attacking the eastern colonists from the west. His success is often credited for changing the course of the American Revolutionary War. At the end of the war, through the Treaty of Paris, the British crown ceded their claims to the land south of the Great Lakes to the newly formed United States, including Native American lands.
The frontier
In 1787, the U.S. defined the Northwest Territory which included the area of present-day Indiana. In 1800, Congress separated Ohio from the Northwest Territory, designating the rest of the land as the Indiana Territory. President Thomas Jefferson chose William Henry Harrison as the governor of the territory, and Vincennes was established as the capital. After the Michigan Territory was separated and the Illinois Territory was formed, Indiana was reduced to its current size and geography.
Starting with the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, Native American titles to Indiana lands were extinguished by usurpation, purchase, or war and treaty. About half the state was acquired in the Treaty of St. Mary's from the Miami in 1818. Purchases were not complete until the Treaty of Mississinewas again with the Miami in 1826 acquired the last of the reserved Native American lands in the northeast.
By 1810, only two counties in the extreme southeast, Clark and Dearborn, had been organized by European settlers. Land titles issued out of Cincinnati were sparse. Settler migration was chiefly via flatboat on the Ohio River westerly, and by wagon trails up the Wabash/White River Valleys (west) and Whitewater River Valleys (east).
After working to maintain peaceful coexistence with the United States, the Shawnee tribal chief Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, "the Shawnee Prophet", encouraged other indigenous tribes in the territory to reject European influences, stop drinking alcohol, and resist further encroachment. Tensions rose and the U.S. authorized Harrison to launch a preemptive expedition against Tecumseh's Confederacy; the U.S. gained victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe on November 7, 1811.
In the War of 1812, the British, who had been assisted by Tecumseh in the capture of Detroit, proposed creating of an Indian barrier state to ensure the security of Upper Canada. After Tecumseh was killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames, resistance to United States control ended in the region. Most Native American tribes in the state were later removed to west of the Mississippi River in the 1820s and 1830s after being forced to accept the "purchase" of their lands.
Statehood and settlement
Corydon, a town in the far southern part of Indiana, was named the second capital of the Indiana Territory in May 1813 in order to decrease the threat of Native American raids following the Battle of Tippecanoe. Two years later, a petition for statehood was approved by the territorial general assembly and sent to Congress. An Enabling Act was passed to provide an election of delegates to write a constitution for Indiana. On June 10, 1816, delegates assembled at Corydon to write a state constitution, which was completed in 19 days. Jonathan Jennings was elected the fledgling state's first governor in August 1816. President James Madison approved Indiana's admission into the union as the nineteenth state on December 11, 1816. In 1825, the state capital was moved from Corydon to Indianapolis.
Many European immigrants went west to settle in Indiana in the early 19th century. The largest immigrant group to settle in Indiana were Germans (German remains the largest ancestry reported in Indiana), as well as many immigrants from Ireland and England. Americans who were primarily ethnically English migrated from the Northern Tier of New York and New England, as well as from the mid-Atlantic state of Pennsylvania. The arrival of steamboats on the Ohio River in 1811, and the National Road at Richmond in 1829, greatly facilitated settlement of northern and western Indiana.
Following statehood, the new government worked to transform Indiana from a frontier into a developed, well-populated, and thriving state, beginning significant demographic and economic changes. In 1836, the state's founders initiated a program, the Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement Act, that led to the construction of roads, canals, railroads and state-funded public schools. The plans bankrupted the state and were a financial disaster, but increased land and produce value more than fourfold. In response to the crisis and in order to avert another, in 1851, a second constitution was adopted, which prohibited public debt. At the same time, however, it included a mandate for a "uniform system of common schools, equally open to all and free of tuition."
In a reaction against an influx of free people of color and emancipated slaves who had been expelled from slave states, Article 13 of the new constitution sought to bar their further immigration into Indiana and proposed their resettlement in Liberia. Citing the newly passed Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Indiana Supreme Court struck down the article in 1866, and it was removed by amendment in 1881. Nevertheless, numerous communities and counties implemented practices to exclude African Americans. These jurisdictions, known as "sundown towns", were prevalent during the 1890s.
Civil War and late 19th-century industry
Indiana was the first western state to mobilize for the United States in the American Civil War, and soldiers from Indiana participated in all the war's major engagements. In 1861, Indiana was assigned a quota of 7,500 soldiers to join the Union Army. So many volunteered in the first call that thousands had to be turned away. Before the war ended, Indiana had contributed 208,367 organized in 126 infantry regiments, 26 batteries of artillery and 13 regiments of cavalry to the Union. Casualties were over 35% of the enlisted: 24,416 men lost their lives and over 50,000 more were wounded. The only Civil War conflicts fought in Indiana were the Newburgh Raid, a bloodless capture of the city; and the Battle of Corydon, which occurred during Morgan's Raid leaving 15 dead, 40 wounded, and 355 captured.
After the war, Indiana remained a largely agricultural state. Post-war industries included mining, including limestone extraction; meatpacking; food processing, such as milling grain, distilling it into alcohol; and the building of wagons, buggies, farm machinery, and hardware. However, the discovery of natural gas in the 1880s in northern Indiana led to an economic boom: the abundant and cheap fuel attracted heavy industry; the availability of jobs, in turn, attracted new settlers from other parts of the country as well as from Europe. This led to the rapid expansion of cities such as South Bend, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne.
Early 20th century
The early decades of the 20th century saw Indiana develop into a leading manufacturing state with heavy industry concentrating in the north. In 1906 the United States Steel Corporation created a new industrial city on Lake Michigan named Gary, after Elbert Henry Gary, its founding chairman. With industrialization, workers developed labor unions (their strike activities induced governor James P. Goodrich to declare martial law in Gary in 1919) and a Socialist Party. Railroader Eugene Debs of Terre Haute, the Socialist candidate received 901,551 votes (6.0% of the national vote) in the 1912 presidential election. Suffrage movements also arose to enfranchise women.
In its earlier years, Indiana was a leader in the automobile boom. Beginning its production in Kokomo in 1896, Haynes-Apperson was the nation's first commercially successful auto company. The importance of vehicle and parts manufacture to the state was symbolized by the construction in 1909 of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
In the 1920s, state politics was heavily influenced by the rise of the Indiana Klan. First organized in 1915 as a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, it appealed to white Protestants alarmed by social and economic trends, including changes induced by immigration from southern and central Europe. In the name of defending "hundred-per-cent Americanism", the Klan sought to exclude from public life "Bolsheviks, Catholics, Jews, Negroes, bootleggers, pacifists, evolutionists, foreigners, and all persons it considered immoral".
By 1925 the Klan had 250,000 members, an estimated 30% of native-born white men. By 1925 over half the elected members of the Indiana General Assembly, the governor of Indiana, and many other high-ranking officials in local and state government were members of the Klan. Politicians had also learned they needed Klan endorsement to win office. That year, "Grand Dragon" D.C. Stephenson, who had begun to brag "I am the law in Indiana", was charged and convicted for the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a young school teacher. Denied pardon, in 1927 Stephenson gave the Indianapolis Times lists of people the Klan had paid. Partly as a result of compounded scandal, membership collapsed.
Throughout the 1930s, New Deal Democrats topped the polls and "the Klan was political poison". During those years, Indiana, like the rest of the nation, was affected by the Great Depression: businesses were shuttered and farm income collapsed. The numbers seeking employment, shelter and relief were augmented by out-of-state Dust Bowl migrants. Swept into office in the nationwide landslide for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Democratic governor Paul V. McNutt, called on Hoosiers to "prove that government may be a great instrument of human progress", and struggled to build a state-funded welfare system to help overwhelmed private charities. He reorganized state government, greatly enlarging his executive powers, introduced state income tax and ended Prohibition. On several occasions, he declared martial law to put an end to worker strikes.
World War II helped lift Indiana's economy, as the war required steel, food and other goods the state produced. Roughly 10% of Indiana's population joined the armed forces, while hundreds of industries earned war production contracts and began making war material. Indiana manufactured 4.5% of total U.S. military armaments during World War II, ranking eighth among the 48 states. The expansion of industry to meet war demands helped end the Great Depression.
Post World War II
With economic recovery, the Republican supremacy in the state was restored. Manufacturers became the primary employers, a trend that continued into the 1960s. Urbanization during the 1950s and 1960s led to substantial growth in the state's cities. The auto, steel and pharmaceutical industries topped Indiana's major businesses. Indiana's population continued to grow after the war, exceeding five million by the 1970 census.
In the early 1960s, Democrats briefly returned to state office, and under the administration of Matthew E. Welsh the state adopted its first sales tax of 2%. Indiana schools were desegregated in 1949. In 1950, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Indiana's population as 95.5% white and 4.4% black. Governor Welsh also worked with the General Assembly to pass the Indiana Civil Rights Bill, granting equal protection to minorities in seeking employment.
The 1973 oil crisis created a recession that hurt the automotive industry in Indiana. Companies began a long series of downsizing that contributed to high unemployment rates in long-established manufacturing centers such as Anderson, Gary, Muncie, and Kokomo. The trend continued until the 1980s when the national and state economy began to diversify from heavy industry toward services and high-tech manufacturing, and to recover. Meanwhile, the farm crisis of the 1980s accelerated rural flight and farm consolidation, a trend that has resumed in the 21st century.
21st century
On March 6, 2020, following the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the state, Governor Eric Holcomb and state health officials declared a public health emergency. After a period in which there were a number of pandemic-related restrictions and advisories, and sharp job cuts, Holcomb signed a bill to end the emergency on March 3, 2022.
At that point, employment had already recovered, but in comparative terms state appeared, post-COVID, to face greater challenges. In 2025 Indiana's economy (the state's business environment, labor market and overall economic growth) ranked 40th in the first U.S. News & World Report's annual report on how well all 50 states in the United States serve citizens, down from 25th in 2018.
Indiana's highest ranking on the 2025 "scorecard" was 16th in the opportunity category. It was 30th in economic opportunity, and 39th in equality, but benefitted from being 18th in affordability (by comparison New Hampshire, which was 1st in economic opportunity and 3rd in equality, was 42nd in affordability). Its lowest score was for pollution and natural environment, with Indiana ranking worst among the 50 states.
From Wikipedia’s article on Indiana, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5