290 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



your chief to stay on his own land as we do on ours. Adieu ! Go and never 

 return, or our wild warriors will make you fall." 



"We," said the chiefs of the Missouris and Osages, " think like our breth- 

 ren, the Illinois and we will aid them to keep their lands. Why, O Englishmen, 

 do you not remain o)i your lands as the red men do on theirs. These lands are 

 ours, we hold them from our fathers. They lived upon them and now they are 

 ours. No one can claim them of us, therefore, depart. Begone ! begone, and 

 tell your chief the red men will have no Englishmen here. Begone, never to 

 return."* 



Such was the frenzy the Indians had worked themselves up to, that the Eng- 

 lish agent was in personal danger and owed his safety to the circumspection of 

 St. Angef , who remained as the respresentative of the French. ' Ross, the Eng- 

 lish representative was obliged to descend to New Orleans, leaving the French 

 still temporarily in possession of the Illinois district. 



In 1766. Matthew Clarkson a merchant of Philadelphia made a journey over- 

 land to Fort Chartres on the Mississippi, and in a diary in which he recorded in- 

 ciclents of the trip he mentions the Osages as follows : December 23rd, 1766, a 

 part7 of Osages came to the fort, Tawanahet, the chief. Mons. Jeredot,J the 

 elder \,'ho has been a trader for many years among the Indians informed me that 

 the Osages live on a river of the same name which falls into the Missouri from 



the southward. That they have about men capable of bearing arms. He 



says that they have a feast which they generally celebrate about the month of 

 March, when they bake a large corn cake of about three or four feet in diameter, 

 and of two or three inches in thickness. This is cut into pieces from the center 

 to the circumference, and the principal chief or warrior arises and advances to 

 the cake, where he declares his valor and recounts his noble actions. If he is 

 not contradicted or no one has aught to allege against him he takes a piece of 

 cake and distributes it among the boys of the nation, repeating to them his noble 

 exploits and exhorting them to imitate them. Another then approaches, and in 

 the same manner recounts his achievements and proceeds as before. Should any 

 attempt to take of the cake to whose character there is the least exception, he is 

 stigmatized and set aside as a poltroon." 



Feasts were frequently observed among nearly all the Indian tribes, and 

 generally had some peculiar significance. Some of the southern tribes had a 

 special feast for every month, among the number there was one called the Green 

 Corn Feast, which occurred in May. Among some of the tribes on the Missouri 



* The noted warrior, Pontiac, was the chief instigator of this opposiion to the English. He was present at 

 this council with four hu dred warriors from the lakes and declared that if the English were permitted to take 

 possession of the fort he would destroy it. 



f A Canad'an offi er prominent in the early history of ihe Mississippi Vjlley. He was at Fort Orleans, in 

 1724, but retired t' Kaskaskia btfore the massacre at that post. After the surrender of the eastern part of 

 Louisiana to the English, he, wiih most of the French, removed from Fort Chartres and Kaskaskia, to La- 

 clede's new post of St. Louis, where his name is perpetuated in a street called St. Ange Ave. 



{Jean Baptiste Girardeau, or as spelled by himself, Girardot. The ancestor of the family whose name is 

 perpetuated in the name of a tuwn and county in our State. 



