Mysteries of Warren County, Indiana: Kickapoo Falls

I include Kickapoo Falls in my series of mysteries because I regard the place as mysterious. In the 1960s, my parents took my brother and me to see the cliff, which was on Kickapoo Creek deep in a forest across the Wabash River from Attica, Indiana. The rocky cleft loomed up from the shadows and impressed my young imagination as ancient and elemental: a defile formed from cosmic clashes. I saw no water splashing from the heights, but I guess that rivulets might cascade from the stone precipice during rainy weather. My father warned us children not to circle around to the top of the falls—a proposal from my brother, as I remember—because someone long before had slipped and died. I needed no further persuasion, as I was fearful of heights anyway. I felt relieved when we returned to our car.

Kickapoo Falls in Warren County, Indiana

In his article entitled “The Potawatomi Reservations in Benton, Fountain, Warren and Tippecanoe Counties,” published in The Indiana Magazine of History, Attica attorney and historian J. Wesley Whickcar (occasionally spelled Whicker—which is a mystery to me) said that Sheshepah, or Little Duck, the representative of the Kickapoo and Potawatomi, was the son of a Potawatomi father and a Kickapoo mother. Sheshepah was born at Kickapoo Falls. He signed the treaty at Greenville, Ohio, on July 22nd in 1814 as chief of the Kickapoo and affixed his signature to three subsequent treaties. Allegedly, he lived to be 110, when Nankuah murdered him at Nebeker Springs near Covington in Fountain County.

When my family visited Kickapoo Falls, the site was on private property. After I had left for college, the cliff became a destination for rock climbers, and the landowner did not want to be held responsible for any injury; accordingly, the falls were closed to visitors.

My father was right (as he nearly always was): a person had died at the falls. She was Elizabeth Jean Cecil, age 24. She perished on Halloween in 1942. She had taught social sciences and physical education classes at Attica High School for only a year. She and Harold Bowman, a high school student, visited Kickapoo Falls “on a bicycle outing,” according to her obituary posted on Findagrave.com. The obituary continues, “She was gathering moss when she lost her footing and fell.”

I saw Kickapoo Falls only once, but, to this day, I recall the place as exceedingly somber. Edgar Allan Poe’s poem entitled “Ulalume” mentions a “ghoul-haunted woodland.” I consider Kickapoo Falls such a ghastly place.