Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/161



Indians came Fathers De Smet and Verreydt, two Catholic priests, who established a mission, erecting a rude building for religious services. A cemetery was prepared where the dead were buried up to 1846 when the Indians removed to their Kansas reservation. One of the Pottawattamie villages was on the Nishnabotna River, near where the old county seat, Lewis, was built in Cass County. Its Indian name was Mi-an-mise (“The Young Miami”), after one of their chiefs, and here was located one of their largest burial grounds. Pottawattamie County was named to perpetuate the memory of this tribe whose lands embraced its territory.

On the 5th of June, 1846, a treaty was made with the Pottawattamies by which they exchanged their Iowa lands for a reservation thirty miles square within the limits of Kansas, to which they removed. The Pottawattamies were called by the French Pouks, and by this name they were designated on the early maps. The word Pottawattamie means “makers of fire” and was to the tribe expressive of the fact that they had become an independent people. Their relations with the Ottawas and Chippeways were intimate, as the language of the three tribes was substantially the same. In the transaction of important business their chiefs assembled around one council fire.

THE DAKOTAS

By careful examination of the records of the earliest explorers of the Northwest, it is ascertained that three great Indian nations occupied the upper Mississippi Valley in the sixteenth century. The most powerful and populous of these was the Dakota nation. The wanderings of these Indians extended northward to latitude 55° in the Rocky Mountains, east to the Red River of the north, southward along the headwaters of the Minnesota River, thence east to the shores of Green Bay. In the Rocky Mountains they were found as far south as the headwaters of the