Odeba

Kiwigapawa lay in the Wisconsin country between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, where the Fox flows through marshes and the Wisconsin cuts sandstone bluffs on its way to the Mississippi. Kickapoo, an Algonquian-speaking people, lived here in villages and traded with neighbouring Fox, Sauk and Mascouten communities. In about 1667 the Jesuit missionary Claude Allouez met Kickapoo families between these two rivers, and his reports are among the first European accounts of the area. In the following decades some Kickapoo moved south into Illinois and toward the Wabash, but many kept close ties with the Potawatomi and the Fox in the upper country.