FROM DE SOTO TO LA SALLE
continued

Then, in the mid-century, a new group of Indians, the Quapaws came in and pushed the remnants of the Pacaha southward. Evidence compiled first by an informant of Governor George Izard in 1827, and confirmed by the DeSoto Commission indicates the Pacaha were the Tunica Indians that eventually wound up south of the Arkansas near the Yazoo River east of the Mississippi River in what is now western Mississippi. The Tunicas got caught in a squeeze in the 18th century between the Chickasaws and Choctaws to the east and the French and later the Spanish along the Mississippi River, and by 1800 had ceased to be a tribe. However, the name still exists as a town in northwestern Mississippi - Tunica.

Who were the Quapaw and where did they come from?

Oral tradition of the Quapaw assert they were part of Dhegila Sioux group that included the Omahas, Kansas and Ponca Indians that lived in prehistoric times in the Ohio River Valley in Northern Kentucky, in association with Adena Hopewellian groups in that area. Various tribes of the Dhegi Sioux adopted totems of that area.

The Omaha had a clamshell in their sacred bundles, and the Quapaw traced their origin to the water and had subdivisions named fish and turtle. Additionally, the religious form of the Dhegila, while not taking in the mound burials of the Hopewellians, featured a whole array of sky spirits and earth-bound gods. Both Dhegilas and the Hopewellians venerated the serpent. The ceremonial life of both were similar. Hair styles of both were identical.

Additionally, the early French explorers encountered tribes who remembered when the Dhegila Sioux lived in Kentucky. In 1673, an Illinois Indian identified the Quapaw for Father Marquette as the “Akansea”, an Algonquin word. Father Douay who traveled with La Salle learned that the Akansea had once lived in the Ohio Valley but had been driven from the area years earlier. The Illinois Indians called the Ohio River the Akansea. A Dutch map of 1720 placed the Akansea tribe in the southwestern corner of Kentucky. The Popple map of 1733 designates the Cumberland River as the Akanseapi. Thus the Dhegila Sioux had traditionally been associated with the Ohio Valley.

But the early French explorers, Father Marquette and Joliet, found only the Quapaws and not the rest of the Dhegila Sioux on the lower Mississippi at the mouth of the Arkansas. Why did they leave the Ohio Valley? And where were the other Dhegila tribes?

The prime impetus seems to have been given by the Iroquois Confederacy in upper New York State. The Iroquois became organized in 1570, got guns from the Dutch and in succession overwhelmed the Hurons, the Neutrals and the Eries and displaced them by 1656, placing themselves in the Ohio Valley watershed. At the same time, an invasion of Algonquin Indians had come down from the north, according to Delaware Indian tradition. Earlier in the 16th century, the last gasp of the dying temple mound culture had established a center in western Illinois at Cahokia.