6 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL, 37 
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 ‘‘Missouri 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 Royce. 
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, pl. CXLIV, 1896-97, Washington, 1899. 
