Antiquities of central and southeastern Missouri / by Gerard Fowke.

  • Gerard Fowke
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Antiquities of central and southeastern Missouri / by Gerard Fowke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    about the beginning of the eighteenth century they moved up to this place [that is, about four miles below old Fort Orleans, near the mouth of Grand river, on the left bank], where their principal village was found by early French explorers. And further (p. 80): The Missouris are incorporated with [the Oto]; they are their descendants and speak the same language. * * * A very considerable part of the surrounding country formerly belonged to the Missouris, who were once the most powerful nation on the Missouri river, but have been reduced by war and smallpox. Another authority® shows the ^^Little Osage Village in 1805/’ on the south side of the Missouri, in Saline county, between Grand Pass and Malta Bend. The ‘Alissouri Village in 1805” was located in the southwest corner of Chariton county, near the mouth of the Grand river. Neither of these localities is far from the village site at “The Pinnacles” (see p. 82). On a map dated 1763, which accompanies Charlevoix’s Letters (1720), the village of the Missouri is located above Fort Orleans, in about the position of the Osage village as given by Boyce. It appears from all that now can be learned that the Osage Indians never ascended the Missouri farther than the mouth of the Osage river, and as the stone vaults above that point show progressively more skill in their construction we must attribute them either to the Kansa Indians or to some tribe whose name is now lost. The continuous and extensive changes of channel in the Missouri river, and in the Mississippi below their junction, deprive us of any certainty as to the location of the “peninsula” referred to in the Siouan legend. The narrators naturally would have applied the name “Missouri” to the whole river; that is to say, they would have regarded what we now call the Missouri as the principal stream, because they lived on it, and the Mississippi above the junction as a tributary. So we may not have to go to “the northern part of Saint Louis county” to find the place the tradition calls for. There is strong evidence that within a comparatively recent period the stream crossed abruptly from the Missouri to the Illinois bluffs and then back to the Missouri side, in a space of a few miles above and below the present levee. Horseshoe and Pittsburg lakes are remains of this former channel. The mounds of the Cahokia group correspond in form and situation with mounds which formerly existed on the site of Saint Louis, and they are not at all of the same type as those nearest them in Illinois—an indication that when built they were all on the western side of the Mississippi, or according to aboriginal ideas, of the Missouri, river. Thus it is quite probable, pro- viding we admit the essential truth of the Omaha tradition, that this is the “peninsula” to which reference is made, and that in the term a See Royce, “Indian Land Cessions in the United States/' in Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pt. 2, pi. cxLiv, 1896-97, Washington, 1899.
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