THE FORMER RANGE OF THE BUFFALO. 87 
sand. Marquette and Joliet followed it. It led to a path, and 
that to an Indian village. Marquette hailed the Indians in the 
Illinois language, and they answered, “we are Illinois.” hey 
feasted the pale-faces upon sagamity,* fish, dog, and buffalo—the 
fat of the land. The master of ceremonies blew his breath upon 
the food to cool it, and, with spoons of buffalo horn, put three or 
four mouthfuls in the mouths of their guests, “as we would feed a 
bird.” After five days of feasting, smoking and council, six hun- 
dred men, women and children spiced them to their boats, and, 
after promising to return to stay with them, they again committed 
themselves to the current of the Messi-Sepe. They passed by the 
Piesa paintings upon the face of a limestone cliff, of which Mar- 
quette gives a description, and while conversing about them, they 
heard the rushing of the waters of the Missouri, known to them 
by its Algonquin name of Pekitanoui, or Muddy River. Swollen 
by the melting of snows a thousand miles away in the mountains, 
it was pouring its impetuous current into that of the Mississippi, 
freighted with large trees, branches and drift wood, ‘real floating 
islands,” says Marquette. He speaks of the mouth of the Ohio 
River, then known as the Ouaboukigou, which we have corrupted 
into Wabash, and applied to a tributary of the Ohio. The word 
Ohio is of Iroquois origin. The original was Oheo or Youghio, 
and meant beautiful. Farther down they met other Indians who 
feasted them on wild-beef. Marquette says of them “that they 
did not know what a beaver was, and their riches consisted in the 
skins of wild-cattle.” He speaks of the Indians on the lower Mis- 
sissippi as being armed with bucklers made of the skins of wild 
cattle, and says “that the number of wild cattle ey heard bel- 
lowing made them believe that the prairies were near.” The voy- 
ageurs returned about the last of August or the first of September, 
passing up the Illinois River. Upon its banks he again met the 
Peoria Indians, the same that were at Moingona. Of the country 
Father Marquette remarks, “we had seen nothing like this river 
_ for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild-cattle, stag, 
deer, wild-cats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots, and even beaver ; 
its many little lakes and rivers.” + 
Father Claude Allouez, in a ‘‘ Narrative of a Journey to the Ili- 
nois,” written shortly after Marquette’s voyage, in speaking of the 
*Indian meal boiled in water and seasoned with grease 
t Marquette’s Journal, p. 19 of J. G. Shea’s Dis. and Ez. of the Miss. 
