Bodewadomik

The Bodewadomik, or Potawatomi, were an Algonquian-speaking people of the western Great Lakes. With the Ojibwe and Odawa they belonged to the Council of Three Fires.

French records placed them in southwestern Michigan in the early seventeenth century; during the Beaver Wars they fled toward Green Bay. In 1812 chiefs Blackbird and Nuscotomeg led some 500 warriors who defeated an American column evacuating Fort Dearborn near Chicago; the fort was burned. During the 1830s the United States removed most Potawatomi from lands east of the Mississippi.