Piankeshaws forty or fifty. The Miamies are the most numerous; a few
years ago they consisted of about four hundred souls. There do not exist
at the present day (1826) more than five hundred souls of the once great
and powerful Minneway or Illini nation. These Indians, the Minneways,
are said to have been very cruel to their prisoners, not unfrequently
burning them. I have heard of a certain family among the Miamies who
were called man-eaters, as they were accustomed to make a feast of human
flesh when a prisoner was killed. For these enormities, the Sauks and
Foxes, when they took any of the Minneways prisoners, gave them up to
their women to be buffeted to death. They speak also of the Mascontins
with abhorrence, on account of their cruelties. The Sauks and Foxes have
a historical legend of a severe battle having been fought opposite the
mouth of the Iowa river, about fifty or sixty miles above the mouth of
Rock river. The Sauks and Foxes descended the Mississippi in canoes, and
landing at the place above described, started east, towards the enemy:
they had not gone far before they were attacked by a party of the
Mascontins. The battle continued nearly all day; the Sauks and Foxes,
for want of ammunition, finally gave way and fled to their canoes; the
Mascontins pursued them and fought desperately, and left but few of the
Sauks and Foxes to carry home the story of their defeat. Some forty or
fifty years ago, the Sauks and Foxes attacked a small village of
Peorias, about a mile below St. Louis and were there defeated. At a
place on the Illinois river, called Little Rock, there were formerly
killed by the Chippeways and Ottowas, a number of men, women and
children of the Minneway nation. In 1800 the Kickapoos made a great
slaughter of the Kaskaskia Indians. The Main-Pogue, or Potawatimie
juggler, in 1801, killed a great many of the Piankeshaws on the Wabash."

The land on which St. Louis stands, as well as the surrounding country,
was claimed by the Illini confederacy, which had acquiesced in the