Dhegiha

The Dhegiha peoples are the Siouan-speaking Osage, Kansa, Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw. Their shared migration story places them together near the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers before they moved west toward the Missouri and split into separate bands, though some traditions and archaeology suggest an earlier departure.

The Osage settled on the Osage River in Missouri and had horses by 1690. Marquette and Jolliet met them in 1673, and in the 1720s the French built Fort Orleans on the Missouri in their land. By the early nineteenth century the Osage dominated the region between the Missouri and Red rivers, though smallpox in 1801 and 1802 killed up to two thousand of them.