Baxoje

The Baxoje, better known as the Iowa or Ioway, are Chiwere-speaking Siouan people whose own name means grey snow people; the label Iowa comes from a Dakota word meaning sleepy ones, passing into English via French. With the Missouria and Otoe they once belonged to the Ho-Chunk nation, before leaving southern Wisconsin and crossing the Mississippi.

From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century they lived by the Red Pipestone Quarry in present-day southwestern Minnesota, and by the early nineteenth century reached the Platte River, where Lewis and Clark visited them in 1804. Semi-nomadic after adopting horses, they grew maize, lived in bark and earth lodges and traded alum pipes and furs to the French.

Between 1824 and 1836 they ceded their Missouri lands, and in 1837, led by Chief Mahaska, or White Cloud, they were removed to a reservation on the Kansas-Nebraska border.