Oahaha

Oahaha lies in the country where the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers meet the lowlands of central North America. Floodplains, forest and prairie margins gave varied resources, and the rivers carried canoes and trade goods between the communities of the region. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Illinois confederacy, a group of villages sharing a language, controlled much of this valley. They maintained relations of diplomacy, marriage, trade and rivalry with neighbouring peoples. French traders and Jesuit missionaries reached them by the 1670s, and European goods came into the region through Indigenous middlemen.