Indians lived in the sand dunes of Lake Michigan and migrated through Ogden Dunes. Indian arrowheads, pottery, cooking utensils, and other artifacts can be found in the sand dunes today. When the roads were being constructed in Ogden Dunes, many Indian artifacts were uncovered along Diana Road. Indians were known to camp near Long Lake at about the time of Joseph Bailley’s fur trading expeditions in the 1820s. On July 11, 1965, an 8-year-old boy, returning from a hike in the dunes, saw what he thought was a turtle shell buried in the sand north of Indian Camp Trail. Digging in the sand, the boy, John Mohr, discovered that the turtle shell was actually the skull of an Indian buried sitting up. With the help of his father, Marshall Moore, and other kids in the neighborhood, John uncovered a complete human skull and many other bones in the sand. The bones were inspected by the Porter County coroner, sent to the Indiana State Police Crime Laboratory, and then to the Indiana University Bioanthropology Department in Bloomington. After analyzing the bones and the teeth, members of the anthropology department at Indiana University estimated she was a 26 to 29-year-old woman and approximately 5 feet 3 1 /2 inches tall. Her tribe buried only deer bones and no artifacts with her. Since no artifacts accompanied the burial, a definite identification of her tribe can not be made. From the size and shape of her skull and bones, she was identified as a Leni Lenape variety of North American Indian. Perhaps she was from the Hopewellian Indians and lived in the area between 300 and 500 A.D. She could have been a Central Algonquin Indian, perhaps from the Miami tribe, and lived between 1620 and 1820. Once Indiana University completed its investigation, the skull and bones were returned to John Mohr, who reburied the bones at the original burial site· near Indian Camp Trail in Ogden Dunes.
