When the first human beings inhabited Indiana is not known. Hundreds of sites used by primitive hunters, fishermen, and food gatherers before 1000 BC have been found in Indiana. Burial mounds of the Woodland culture (1000 BC to AD 900), when the bow and arrow appeared, have been located across the state. The next culture, called Mississippian and dating about AD 900 to 1500, is marked by gardens, ceramics, tools, weapons, trade, and social organization. It is well illustrated by remains of an extensive village on the north side of the Ohio River near Newburgh. The unidentified inhabitants are believed to have come up from the south about 1300, for reasons not known, and to have migrated back before 1500, again for unknown reasons.

The next Indian invaders, and the first to be seen by white men, were the Miami and Potawatomi tribes that drifted down the west side of Lake Michigan and turned across the northern sector of what is now Indiana after the middle of the 17th century. The Kickapoo and Wea tribes pushed into upper Indiana from northern Illinois. The southern two-thirds of the present state was a vast hunting ground, without villages.

The first European penetration was made in the 1670s by the French explorers Father Jacques Marquette and René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. After the founding of Detroit in 1701, the Maumee-Wabash river route to the lower Ohio was discovered. At the portage between the two rivers, Jean Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, lived at Kekionga, the principal village of the Miami and the present site of Fort Wayne. The first French fort was built farther down the Wabash among the Wea, near modern Lafayette, in 1717. Three years later, Fort Miami was erected. Vincennes’s son constructed another fort on the Wabash in 1732, at the site of the town later named for him.

English traders venturing down the Ohio River disputed the French trade monopoly, and as a result of the French and Indian War, French Canada was given up to the British in 1760. Indians under Chief Pontiac captured the two forts in northern Indiana, and the area was not securely in English hands until 1765. The pre-Revolutionary turbulence in the Atlantic seaboard colonies was hardly felt in Indiana, although the region did not escape the Revolutionary War itself. Colonel George Rogers Clark, acting for Virginia, captured Vincennes from a British garrison early in 1779 after a heroic march. Two years later, a detachment of 108 Pennsylvanians, passing down the Ohio to reinforce Clark, was surprised by a force of French Canadians and Indians under Mohawk Captain Joseph Brant; most of the Pennsylvanians were killed during the battle or after capture.

Following the Revolutionary War, the area northwest of the Ohio River was granted to the new nation; known as the Northwest Territory, it included present-day Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. The first US settlement in Indiana was made in 1784 on land opposite Louisville, Ky., granted to Clark’s veterans by Virginia. (The new town, called Clarksville, still exists.) Americans also moved into Vincennes. Government was established by the Continental Congress under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Again, Indiana unrest endangered all settlements north of the Ohio, and the small US army, with headquarters at Cincinnati, met defeat at what is now Fort Wayne in 1790 and disaster in neighboring Ohio in 1791. General Anthony Wayne was put in command of an enlarged army and defeated the Indians in 1794 at Fallen Timbers (near Toledo, Ohio). British meddling was ended by Jay’s treaty later the same year. Wayne then built a new fort (named for him) among the Miami.

In 1800, as Ohio prepared to enter the Union, the rest of the Northwest Territory was set off and called Indiana Territory, with its capital at Vincennes. There Elihu Stout established a newspaper, the Indiana Gazette, in 1804. After Michigan Territory was detached in 1805, and Illinois Territory in 1809, Indiana assumed its present boundaries. The federal census counted 24,520 people in Indiana in 1810, including a new Swiss colony on the Ohio, where settlers planted vineyards and made wine.

William Henry Harrison was appointed first governor and, with a secretary and three appointed judges, constituted the government of Indiana Territory. Under the Northwest Ordinance, when the population reached 5,000 adult males, it was allowed to elect an assembly and nominate candidates for an upper house. When the population totaled 60,000 (as it did in 1815) the voters were allowed to write a state constitution and to apply for admission to the Union. A short constitution excluding slavery and recommending public schools was adopted and Indiana became the 19th state on 11 December 1816.

Meanwhile, Indiana had seen Governor Harrison lead US troops up the Wabash in 1811 and beat off an Indian attack at Tippecanoe. The War of 1812 took Harrison away from Indiana, and battles were fought in other theaters. Hoosiers suffered Indian raids, and two forts were besieged for a few days. After the war, new settlers began pouring into the state from the upper South and in fewer numbers from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. A group of German Pietists under George Rapp settled Harmonie on the lower Wabash in 1815 and stayed 10 years before selling out to Robert Owen, a visionary with utopian dreams that failed at the village he renamed New Harmony. In 1816, Tom Lincoln brought his family from Kentucky, and his son Abe grew up in southern Indiana from age 7 to 21.

Unlike most other states, Indiana was settled from south to north. The inhabitants were called Hoosiers; the origin of the word is obscure, but the term may have come from an Anglo-Saxon word for hill dwellers. Central and northern Indiana were opened up as land was purchased from the Indians. The Potawatomi were forced to go west in 1838, and the Miami left in 1846. Commerce flowed south to the Ohio River in the form of corn, hogs, whiskey, and timber. Indianapolis was laid out as a planned city and centrally located capital in 1820, but 30 years passed before its population caught up to the size of Madison and New Albany on the Ohio.

An overambitious program of internal improvements (canals and roads) in the 1830s plunged the state into debts it could not pay. Railroads, privately financed, began to tie Indiana commercially with the East. The Irish came to dig canals and lay the rails, and Germans, many of them Catholics, came to do woodworking and farming. Levi Coffin, a Quaker who moved to Fountain City in 1826, opened a different kind of road, the Underground Railroad, to help escaping slaves from the South.

A new constitution in 1851 showed Jacksonian preferences for more elective offices, shorter terms, a one-term governorship, limited biennial legislative sessions, county government, obligatory common schools, and severe limits on state debt. But this constitution also prohibited blacks from entering the state.

Hoosiers showed considerable sympathy with the South in the 1850s, and there was considerable “copperhead” activity in the early 1860s. Nevertheless, Indiana remained staunchly in the Union under Governor Oliver P. Morton, sending some 200,000 soldiers to the Civil War. The state suffered no battles, but General John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry raided the southeastern sector of Indiana in July 1863.