It is difficult to compile a bibliography that will treat exhaustively of this tribe. Catlin’s Works, Lewis and Clark’s Travels, Long’s Expedition, Pike’s Explorations, Maximilian’s Travels, and in fact nearly all of the prominent trans-continental explorers knew the tribe under one or another name. In the absence of any well defined plan it is best to refer to the various titles as shown in the index to the present volume. Such titles are printed in small capitals throughout. Special stress must be laid on the value of Dr. Hayden’s important work, Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley. Phila., 1862. The map is particularly useful. The Burrows Brothers monumental reprint of the Jesuit Relations (73 vols. octavo) is of course invaluable.
William Harvey Miner
March 5, 1911
THE IOWAY MONOGRAPH
“IOWAY” TRIBE: (Aiyuwæ, or Pähu’tchæ)
This is the cognomen of a small tribe of Indians, never very numerous,[46] known to the whites for the last one hundred and eighty years,[47] during which period they have been wanderers from the Mississippi to the Missouri, and from the Missouri to the Mississippi: their migrations being confined mainly to the limits of the present State of Iowa, which was therefore very properly named after them.[48] They are now located within a Reservation of land on the west bank of the Missouri, between the Great Nemahaw and Wolf Creeks, in the State of Nebraska, on the borders of Kansas and Iowa.[49]
NOMENCLATURE
The name by which we know them—that of Ioway—(or Iowa, which is the form the word takes when applied to the State)—is not that for themselves, nor is it a name which belongs to the language of any one Indian tribe; but seems to have been made up, or compounded, by the early French, from the Dakota-Sioux designation for them of Ayu’h’äpä, by taking the first two syllables, Ayu’, and adding to it one of the common Algonquin-French terminations to tribal names in ois, vois, or vais or ouez: all of which terminations appear on the early records compounded with Ayu, or a modification of it, to indicate the Ioway Tribe. In La Harpe’s[50] narrative of Le Sueur’s[51] mining expedition, in 1700, to the Blue Earth region, in now Minnesota, where the Ioways are first of record referred to, they are written of as “Aya-vois”; in Pennecaud’s[52] relation of the same expedition they are the Aiaos or Aiavos, (his MSS[53] in the Congressional Library is obscure); in Charlevoix’s[54] history, 1722, he gives the name with a characteristic effort at precision, as “Aiouez”; and in Lewis and Clark’s Travels, 1812,[55] they appear as “Ayauways.” The French first knew of the Ajowæ through the Dakota-Sioux: (as we will observe hereafter in the gleanings of their early history,) and it is not surprising to me that they should (or that other Indian tribes should) seek to find some easier way of distinguishing the Tribe than to attempt to pronounce the extremely difficult guttural ending of their Sioux designation. The Dakota-Lexicon[56] thus gives its meaning: