Umoho

The Umoho, or Omaha, are a Dhegiha Siouan people whose name means those going against the current. Around 1600 they formed one woodland people with the Quapaw near the Ohio and Wabash rivers, then migrated west and split: the Quapaw went down the Mississippi while the Omaha settled along the upper Missouri.

About 1770 they became the first equestrian people of the Northern Plains. Chief Blackbird built the Big Village, Ton-wa-tonga, in northeast Nebraska, from which the Omaha controlled the fur trade reaching up the river.

A smallpox epidemic around 1800 killed about a third of the tribe, Blackbird among them. Through treaties in 1831 and 1836 they ceded their lands east of the Missouri and their hunting grounds in northwestern Missouri to the United States.