An easy drive from Chicago (125 miles via I-80 or I-90 to I-65 South), Lafayette and West Lafayette are not really twins, like, say, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Lafayette is a typical Indiana industrial burg. West Lafayette, across the Wabash River and home to Purdue University, is a college town.
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In fact, aside from Von’s Bookstore (315 W. State, 317-743-1915) and a couple of places to eat or sit with coffee, the west side offers little to delight the visitor. Time to turn around and cross the river.
A little farther northeast on Prophets Rock Road is the feature that gives the road its name: “Prophet’s Rock, where the prophet sat and sang to encourage the Indians in the battle of November 7, 1811. Erected 1929 by the General de Lafayette Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution.” So reads the inscription on a three-foot-high stone standing next to a tiny parking lot right off the road. Above it is an eroding hillside, out of which a rock juts; the position of many trees, their roots exposed, looks increasingly precarious. A heavy storm seems to have come through recently, shearing off the tops of many trees and felling another. The debris surrounds and almost covers the DAR’s dedication stone. Despite the fact that the place is neither guarded nor tended, there’s no trash or graffiti. Standing on top of the rock where the Prophet must have stood, you can see the Wabash valley–fields, woodlands, the river in the distance. If you try to imagine what it must have been like back when the native Americans fought unsuccessfully for their survival, you have to wonder in what spirit the DAR dedicated this memorial. A monument to the victory of the European settlers or a memorial to their defeated foe?
