Early Description of the Miami Indians in Present Day Fort Wayne, Indiana

A picture of conditions about the confluence of the St. Mary's and the St. Joseph at this time comes down to us from the letter of a French officer, writing in 1718. ' ' The Miamis are sixty leagues from Lake Erie and number four hundred, all good-formed men and well tattooed," he writes. "They are hard-working, and raise a species of maize unlike that of our Indians at Detroit. It is white, of the same size as the other, the skin much finer, and the meal much whiter. This nation is clad in deerskin, and when a woman goes with another man, her husband cuts off her nose and refuses to see her any more. They have plays and dances; where fore they have more occupation. The women are well clothed, but the men use scarcely any covering, and are tattooed all over the body." The writer adds in description of the region to the south-west, along the Wabash, that "from the summit of this elevation nothing is visible to the eye but prairies full of buffalo. ' ' Another writer of the same year adds strength to the correctness of the latter remarkable statement in the claim that along the Maumee river, at the mouth of the Auglaize, near the present city of Defiance, Ohio, "buffaloes are always to be found; they eat the clay and wallow in it."  Five years earlier, Father Gabriel Marest, a French missionary, wrote of the region to the southward that "the quantity of buffalo and bear found on the Oubache [Wabash] is incredible," and LaSalle in 1682, describing the region of the Ohio, says: "The multitude of buffalo is beyond belief. I have seen twelve hundred of them killed in eight days by a single band of Indians."

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