Welcome to the Peoria Tribe Archives of the state of Oklahoma!

Peoria Tribe

Tribe Name: A French corruption of the word Peouarea, meaning "he comes carrying a pack on his back."

Language: Formerly one of  the five tribes of the Illinois Confederacy , belonging to the Algonquian linguistic family.

History: The Peoria Tribe once first lived near the mouth of the Wisconsin River in the area of Prairie du Chien, then moved southward to the site of present Peoria, Illinois.

After the French and Indian War, their enemies (including the Kickapoo and Fox tribes) began a war of extermination against all Illinois Tribes. Some joined with the Wea and settled on the Blackwater Fork near St. Genevieve, Missouri, but most stayed and faced near destruction. In 1818, they united with the Kaskaskia. In 1832, the Peoria and other Illinois Confederacy members gave up their land in Illinois and Missouri and were assigned a reservation in Miami County, Kansas. There they prospered as an industrious people under the influence of a Roman Catholic mission.

The influx of white settlers led them to join with neighboring peoples: In 1849 , they and remnants of seven other Illinois Tribes merged to become the confederated Peoria. With the 1861 organization of the state of Kansas, the tribes were harassed by inequities and illegal property taxation. At the end of the Civil War  they signed a treaty that sold their land in Kansas and called for their removal to Indian Territory. With the proceeds they purchased their new I.T. reservation  (in Ottawa County) from the Quapaw and Shawnee. In 1873, the Confederated Peoria united with the Miami tribe and became known as the United Peoria and Miami.

In 1893, they recieved individual allotments of tribal lands and in 1907, became citizens of the new state of Oklahoma.

Chief  Baptiste Peoria (Lanepeshaw) of Wea-Peoria-French descent was a man of great character  and ability, he spoke French as well as several Indian languages, and was respected by U.S. Officials and revered by his tribe.

Peoria Tribe  Archivist
Position open

Gene Phillips -State Archivist

Linda Simpson - Archivist-Indian Nations/Indian Territory 

Help the Peoria Tribe Archives grow, kindly submit your data.

If you have any cemetery records, bible records, deeds, applications for citizenship in the  Peoria Tribe, land patents, probate records, allotment records, etc, that pertain to the Peoria Tribe, please send them to me as an attachment in an e-mail to Interim File Manager. Please be sure to identify that it is for the  Peoria Tribe. It also needs to be a plain text file, no HTML and no images. This ensures that everybody will be able to read it, no matter what kind of web browser. Here is a help file.

The information  submitted to The USGenWeb Archive Project  is offered free to all who visit. The ownership - copyright stays with the submitter. Please read and respect the copyright on all submittals.