Mascouten

The Mascouten were an Algonquian-speaking people of the upper Great Lakes; Mascouten, meaning the little prairie people, was the Fox name for them, and the French knew them as the Nation du Feu, or Fire Nation. In the early seventeenth century they lived in southern Michigan and appeared on Champlain's map of 1616.

The Beaver Wars shattered them: raids in the 1640s and 1650s drove them from Michigan toward the Mississippi. French visitors around 1670 found perhaps two thousand survivors. They entered the French fur trade through Green Bay.

Around 1712, after being nearly destroyed in the Fox Wars, the remaining Mascouten joined the Kickapoo and Meskwaki. A band on the Wabash River is mentioned for the last time in 1779, and United States records of 1813 and 1825 count the survivors as part of the Kickapoo Prairie Band.