Niuachi

The Niuachi, or Niutachi, are the people better known as the Missouria; their own name means People of the River Mouth, while Missouri comes from an Illinois word for someone with a dugout canoe. Speakers of Chiwere, they, according to their oral history, once lived north of the Great Lakes before moving south in the sixteenth century, a migration linked to the Oneota culture.

By the early seventeenth century they were settled where the Grand River meets the Missouri, and there Jacques Marquette met them in 1673 and opened trade with New France.

A Sauk and Meskwaki raid of 1730 killed hundreds and all but destroyed the tribe, and after the smallpox epidemic of 1829 fewer than a hundred survived, all of whom joined the Otoe and ceded their Missouri lands with them in 1830.