Peewareewa

Peewareewa, rendered Peoria in French records, is the Illinois-language autonym meaning one who comes carrying a pack on his back. They were one of the twelve Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Illinois Confederation, with villages along the Illinois River and the eastern shore of the Mississippi, and were partly descended from the Cahokia people.

French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet met a Peoria band near the mouth of the Des Moines River in 1673, and Jesuit missions and the fur trade soon bound the tribe to New France. When France ceded the Illinois Country to Britain in 1763, the Peoria crossed the Mississippi into Spanish Missouri.

They ceded their Illinois lands in 1818 and their Missouri claims in 1832, after which they were assigned lands in Kansas and became the nucleus of the Confederated Peoria, gathering in the remnants of other tribes.