Native American Tribe Series
Sac
Their own name, Osakiwug, means "people of the yellow earth. They were one of a number of Algonquian tribes whose earliest known location was on the Michigan peninsula, the other tribes being the Potawatomie, Mascouten, and the Fox. The Sac, along with these other tribes were first known to Europeans under the general term "Gens de Feu," first recorded by French navigators, Samuel de Champlain and Gabriel Sagard. Before they became known as an independent tribe, they also formed a part a Algonquian community which was called the Huron by the French. They were first mentioned independently Father Jean Claude Allouez in 1640 under the generic Huron name Hvattoehronon, meaning "People of the sunset."
Father Allouez, a Jesuit missionary, would later write in 1667, that the Sac were more savage than all the other peoples he had met and they were a populous tribe, although they had no fixed dwelling place, being wanderers. He was also told that if the Sac or Fox found a person in an isolated place they would kill him, especially if he were a Frenchman, for they could not endure the sight of the whiskers of the Europeans. Yet, two years later, he reported that the first place in which he began to give religious instruction was in a village of the "Ousaki," situated at the DePere Rapids, Wisconsin, wherein he found several tribes in winter quarters, number about 600 people.
For years, the Sac, along with the other nations of the "Gens de Feu," were at war with the Neuter and Ottawa tribes, and were finally driven out of the northern peninsula of Michigan, then settling around Green Bay and the Fox River of Wisconsin, as well as in northern Illinois. In the early 1800's one group of Sac moved to Missouri, and later to Kansas and Nebraska. Another group moved to Iowa. The Sac were estimated to be about 750 people in 1736 and about 2,500 in 1834. In 1869, the larger group of Sac moved into reservations in Oklahoma, where they merged with the Meskwaki as the federally recognized Sac and Fox Nation. A smaller number of Sac remained in Iowa,Kansas and Nebraska.
Mondo's NAT #479 - Sac
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