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into White River, June 7, 1820. Indianapolis consequently has served as the capital of the commonwealth nearly one hundred years.
Corydon, the pleasant village of story and pageant, had that distinction for a brief time immediately after the state was admitted into the Union, affixing by her admission, the nineteenth star to the flag.
Reviewing history we find there were many and far distant capitals. When France through her explorers possessed a vast domain of which this territory was a part, Paris was the capital. By the treaty of Paris, at the close of the Seven Years War, it shifted to London. Richmond, Virginia followed, after the Revolution, when Clark took possession of the country west of the Ohio river. The capital was nearer when Virginia’s rule ceased in 1790 on the formation of the Northwest Territory, for Marietta, Ohio, was made the seat of government. Ten years later Vincennes had this distinction when Indiana Territory was established. Vincennes forms, therefore, the last link in the chain of capitals joining Paris in France, many leagues away, to Indiana Territory through the frontier French town on the Wabash.
Through these centuries of changing government Indiana can claim a past as interesting as it is remote, reaching as it does to the days when Louis the Great, fourteenth of that name, sat on the throne of France.
But kings and thrones have little to do with the “Capital in the Wilderness,” our present concern, except perhaps to serve as a background, a dim and faded tapestry hung on the walls of memory bringing out by contrast the virility, the sturdiness, and the self dependence of the pioneers.
Mention has been made of the Commissioners earlier in this paper—let us join them as they sit about the cherry table (still in existence) in John McCormick’s cabin considering
