For centuries, many Native American tribes inhabited the Princeton area, including the Piankeshaw, Wea, Shawnee, Deleware, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, Miami and Pottawatomi. They fished the area's rivers and streams, hunted buffalo, bear, and deer, grew corn, beans, and squash, and made clay pottery and flint arrowheads. They ate elk, birds, turtles, mussels, clams, nuts, seeds, and other plants found here in abundance. The tribes primarily lived in wigwams made of arched wooden poles, thatch, tree bark, and animal hide, and traveled by canoe or by trails and traces through the wilderness. Two important routes crossed here: the north-south Red Bank Trail, which ran from the Ohio River north of Henderson through Princeton to Vincennes, and the east-west Patoka Trace, which ran from Corydon through Princeton. Their intersection is now where Broadway and Main Streets cross in downtown Princeton, and early settlers also traveled these routes. When the first settler, John Severns, arrived on the banks of the Patoka River just north of present-day Princeton, he befriended the Shawnee and Miami living there, but good relations did not last long as more immigrants arrived and the U.S. government used force to push Native Americans off their lands. After losing the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, they eventually ceded all their Indiana lands to the U.S. government and were forced to relocate to unfamiliar lands and climates in the West.