If Obama got the Rick Perlstein treatment:

To the average American, it may have seemed that Senator Obama intended to invoke Abraham Lincoln by announcing his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois. But Springfield has another history – which raises certain suspicions about that announcement speech. You see, Springfield was the origin of the infamous Donner Party, whose trip to the West ended in cannibalism. And that’s not all:
Also ill-fated were the 850 Pottawatomis who trudged through Springfield in 1838, past the Old State Capitol, then being built. Under armed military guard, the Native Americans were on a forced march, later known as the Trail of Death, from Indiana and Michigan to Kansas. It was part of the U.S. government’s effort to resettle all tribes west of the Mississippi. The 660-mile journey, also commemorated in a plaque on the kiosk, took 10 weeks, and the death toll is estimated to have been at least 40. Was Senator Obama secretly using coded appeals to cannibals, and conjuring up the wistful nostalgia of some Americans for the days of forced resettlement of Native