Long before skyscrapers and speedways, Indianapolis faced one of the strangest invasions in American history — The Great Squirrel Stampede of 1822.
That year, settlers around Indianapolis and Hamilton County witnessed thousands of gray and black squirrels pouring through the forests like a moving carpet of fur. They crossed rivers, scaled fences, and tore through cornfields with unstoppable hunger. Early farmer diaries described the ground “as if
alive,” and one man claimed to have killed 248 squirrels in three days just trying to save his crops.
Entire fields were destroyed, forcing locals to form impromptu “squirrel militias.” Armed with muskets, dogs, and clubs, they fought back against what some called “a living wave of destruction.” By season’s end, much of central Indiana’s harvest was lost — and the legend of the Squirrel War was born.
Historians now think a poor acorn crop that year drove the squirrels out of the woods and into farmland. Whatever the cause, the bizarre event became part of Indiana folklore, retold for generations as a wild example of man versus nature.
Today, Hamilton County even celebrates the quirky history with art and community events — proof that sometimes, even chaos leaves behind a good story.
Was it foklore? NOPE !
Central to our knowledge of the stampede are the writings of Calvin Fletcher, an Indianapolis lawyer and diarist whose papers are preserved by the Indiana Historical Society. In a letter included in his diary he wrote that “the corn this year was literally destroyed,” and that “one man killed … 248 [squirrels] in 3 days” while others lost whole fields. (Fletcher’s diary appears in The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Vol. I; the quotation is reproduced in local histories). Hamilton East Public Library Website+1
Another eyewitness—Oliver Johnson, who settled in Marion County as a child—later recalled that families patrolled fields with rifles and that at one point “one day I counted eighteen dead squirrels I shot from a tree” and piled so many carcasses they attracted buzzards. That reminiscence was recorded in A Home in the Woods: Oliver Johnson’s Reminiscences of Early Marion County. Hamilton East Public Library Website+1
BJ
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