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.
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| 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.
