Chepoussa

Chepoussa lay in the Illinois country of the central Mississippi valley, on the wooded bluffs above the river where prairie and forest meet. The people were one of the communities that spoke the Illinois language and shared villages and hunting grounds with their kin. They planted corn and beans on the bottomlands, hunted bison on the prairies to the west, and fished the river and its backwaters. In the late seventeenth century French explorers La Salle and Allouez recorded their name, which may have referred to a leader or to a stream known by the same word.