In 1820, the state legislature of Indiana, operating from the Ohio River city of Corydon, voted to move the capital of the four years young political entity to Indianapolis. While the vast majority of the state’s 150,000 residents lived in the southern portion of the state, the population of the “disjointed mechanism” that was Indiana were loath to work together. Since the earliest settlements, Hoosiers in the eastern Whitewater and western Wabash River Valleys needled each other over the rights to internal improvement funds from the state and insisted that one was trying to strangle the others’ opportunity. In order to assuage cries of favoritism, the authorities sent surveyors to look for a location that would treat all aspects of the state equally and provide “the advantages of a navigable stream and fertility of soil” to all residents...