10 BULLETIN 183, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



By 1724 the lure of furs and, secondarily, a desire to forestall 

 Spanish designs on the mineral resources of Missouri had brought 

 about the establishment of a French trading post by Bourgmond at a 

 Missouri village near the mouth of Grand River. This, Fort Orleans, 

 was abandoned in or soon after 1726 (Houck, 1908, pp. 258-268). 

 It was superseded by another among the Kansa, whose village then 

 seems to have stood just north of present Fort Leavenworth, Kans., 

 at Salt Creek on the right bank of the Missouri. The name, date 

 of founding, and abandonment of this station are unknown, though 

 it was operating in 1757 (Margry, 1867, p. 41).^ 



Less than a half century later, all the villages mentioned in the 

 early documents had been given up. When Lewis and Clark ascended 

 the river they found no inhabited sites anywhere along its banks 

 in the 500 miles below the present southern boundary of Nebraska. 

 Subsequent archeological explorations in the same area have re- 

 vealed evidence of scarcely a dozen postcontact native villages, in 

 striking contrast to the great profusion of precontact remains. An 

 explanation for this apparent aversion by recent tribes to an other- 

 wise unexcelled environment is given by Lewis and Clark (Thwaites, 

 1904a, p. 47), whose observations are worth quoting at some length 

 for the hints they offer of conditions during the protohistoric period. 



On June 13, 1804, the party passed "two Creeks called the round 

 bend Creeks between those two Creeks and behind a Small Willow 

 Island in the bend is a Prarie in which the Missouries Indians once 

 lived and the Spot where 300 [200] of them fell a sacrifise to the 

 iury of the Saukees, this nation (Missouries) once the most noumerous 

 nation in this part of the Continent now reduced to about 30 f ^'' [fires, 

 i. e., families] and that fiew under the protection of the Otteaus 

 [Ottos] on R. Piatt who themselves are declining. . . ." 



Two days later, on June 15, they "camped on the SS nearly opposit 

 the antient Village of the Little Osarges and below the Anf^ Village 

 of the Missouries both Situations in view within three M? of each other, 

 the Osage were Settled at the foot [of] a hill in a butifull Plain, 

 which extends back quite to the Osage River, in front of the Vilg: 

 next to the river is an ellegent bottom Plain which extends several 

 miles in length on the river in this low Prarie the Missouries lived 

 after they were reduced by the Saukees at their Town Some Dist? 

 below. The little osage finding themselves much oppressed by the 

 Saukees and other nations, left this place and built a village 5 M- from 

 the Grand Osage Town, about years ago a fiew of the Missouries 



« At this time, Bougainville says, the French -were trading with the Osages and Missouris, 

 "nations bordering one another . . .," 80 leagues up the Missouri. 



