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By
the time St: Louis, St. Charles, New Madris and Cape Girardeau became
trading centers, Missouri's Indian history was assuming definite form.
The tall, somber, superstitious Osages and the Missouris controlled most
of the Missouri country, dividing their time between tilling the soil
and hunting, with an occasional war as diversion. The Missouris lived
along the river of that name; the Osage to the south. Heads of the
Osages were flat at the back, with protruding foreheads, the result of
binding them to boards in infancy.
The fighting Sacs and Foxes moved into Northeast Missouri then spread
westward. In alliance with the Ioways, they almost annihilated the
Missouris in 1798. The Potawatamies and the Winnebagoes also stopped for
a while in Northeast Missouri, and the Kickapoos lived there for a time
before migrating south-westward. In 1798, Louis Lorimer, founder of Cape
Girardeau who had married the daughter of a Shawnee chief, brought some
of the partly-civilized Shawnees and Delawares from Ohio to the vicinity
of the Cape, there to act as a "buffer state" between the white settlers
and the Osages.
Twenty-one additional Indian tribes, with an aggregate membership of
30,000 crossed the Missouri between 1804 and 1825. Some merely traveled
through; others remained a few years. Most, however, visited the sacred
council grounds on the Missouri River near St. Joseph. There many tribes
came annually at peace for colorful ceremonies and to hear the
deliverances of the Prophet through the tribal medicine men
Missouri was relatively free from Indian conflicts. Peace was promoted
by William Clark as Indian agent for the United States and first
governor of the Missouri territory. Hundreds of Indian leaders annually
accepted his invitation to visit him in St. Louis for pow-wows on their
problems. One massacre occurred, however, long before arrival of the
white settlers. The Missouris killed about fifty Spaniards who invaded
their territory in 1720, bringing arms and a plan to incite the Osages
against the Missouris. The Spaniards marched into the wrong camp,
revealed the plot and distributed the arms, which the Missouris turned
on the invaders. The only attack on St. Louis, May 26, 1780, ended
quickly, the defenders' cannons terrifying the savages.
At
the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Indians in Missouri outnumbered
the whites, 3 to I. As the settlers increased in numbers, the Indians
were driven ever westward. The Sacs and Foxes relinquished their claims
in Missouri in 1804, 1815 and 1826, and finally through the Platte
Purchase in 1836, by virtue of which six counties in Northwest Missouri
were acquired from them and the Ioways. The Osages give up their lands
in the state in treaties signed in 1808 and 1825, moving to Oklahoma,
where they still reside. The Shawnees and Delawares departed in 1832,
and the Missouris were moved to Oklahoma in 1835. |