Drive through Montpelier, Indiana on State Road 18 and you'll spot something impossible to miss: a 25-foot-tall fiberglass figure gazing out over the town. The Montpelier Indian has become a local landmark, but its journey here tells a quieter story about land, loss, and how a community chose to remember.
The statue arrived in 1984 as a gift from Miami Indian Chief Larry Godfroy, a descendant of Chief François Godfroy, whose people once held these lands. In 1818, Chief François Godfroy signed a treaty ceding 3,840 acres along the nearby Salamonie River to the United States. The plaque in front of the statue marks that agreement—a moment when indigenous territory became something else.
A roadside figure finds purpose
Before Montpelier claimed it, the statue had lived several lives. It spent time as a car dealership advertisement in Indianapolis, then migrated to a museum in Bismarck, North Dakota, and later to a Native American museum at Eagle Creek Park in Indianapolis. These tall fiberglass figures, nicknamed "Muffler Men" since the 1960s, were built as roadside attractions and commercial gimmicks. Most were forgotten or demolished.
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Start Your News DetoxBut Montpelier did something different. When Chief Larry Godfroy offered the statue to the town, they accepted it not as kitsch but as a marker—a way to acknowledge the Miami people whose ancestral lands the town occupies. The statue became a permanent fixture, a 25-foot-tall acknowledgment that this place has a history before the roads and the storefronts.
It's easy to misread the figure as a generic "Indian" or assume it represents Chief François Godfroy himself (it doesn't). The real significance lies in the choice: a small Indiana town decided to keep this artifact visible, to place a plaque beside it explaining the treaty, to let the statue stand as a question about what was here before.
That's not a complete answer to the complicated history of Native American displacement. But it's a start—a 25-foot reminder that some communities are willing to acknowledge what they inherited and who they inherited it from.
