The People Who Named This Place

Before the French arrived, before the forts and the distilleries and the courthouse speeches, the Illinois River ran through a country already well-named. The people who lived here called themselves the Peouarea, or something close to it. In their own language, the word meant roughly "he who carries a pack on his back", a descriptor that likely traced a personal name into a collective identity. The French transcribed the word as Peouaroua, and eventually it passed into English as Peoria.

The Peoria were one of several nations that made up the Illinois Confederacy, a loose alliance of Algonquian-speaking peoples, the Kaskaskia, the Michigamea, the Moingwena, the Tamaroa, the Cahokia, and the Peoria among them. Their settlements clustered along this stretch of the Illinois River, where the river widens into a long, shallow lake they called Pimiteoui, a word the French later applied to the whole widening. They farmed and fished and traded, and their networks extended far across the Middle West.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, the Confederacy had been decimated. Generations of Iroquois pressure from the east, followed by violence from neighboring Sac and Fox nations, had contracted the Illinois nations from a population historians estimate at several tens of thousands to only a few hundred. The Peoria and Kaskaskia, survivors of the rest, were pushed south toward Kaskaskia, then west across the Mississippi, then finally to a reserved tract in what is now Kansas and Oklahoma, where the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma holds federal recognition today.

The name of the city they left behind is the longest continuous presence they still have here.