Officially known as the Sac and Fox of Iowa, the Mesquakies are the only Native American tribe in Iowa today. The tribe still owns land it purchased from the state of Iowa in 1857 and owns and operates businesses near the community of Tama in the central region of the state. The key to understanding the tribe is to follow its tracks through history. How the tribe came to take on the name Mesquakie reveals much about the people, who have always been tenacious in their self-determination and resistance to Anglo-American acculturation. Such resistance can be seen in their refusal to accept tribal names given to them by outsiders. It was the French who first labeled the tribe the Fox when they encountered them in the 1600s, and two hundred years later the U.S. government renamed them "the Sac and Fox of Iowa." Yet for all intents and purposes the tribe has always recognized itself and its members as the Mesquakies (Red Earth People) or derivatives thereof. Some scholars suggest that prior to European contact the Mesquakies lived near what is now the St. Lawrence Seaway but were forced into the western Great Lakes region by the Iroquois. Jean Nicolet, a Frenchman who at the time was mapping a route down the Great Lakes waterway into the North American interior for French Governor Samuel de Champlain, was reputedly the first European to meet the Mesquakies, in 1634. In 1667 a French Jesuit missionary, Claude Allouez, recorded seeing a thousand Mesquakies near the Wolf River in Wisconsin. During this time, the Mesquakies lived primarily in the Green Bay region on the southern rim of Lake Superior. The tribe's culture was then primarily like that of other hunting and horticultural peoples of the Great Lakes area. The people lived in villages, usually named after their band's leader, during the warmer seasons, occupying permanent lodges that were made of poles and elm bark. Each lodge housed anywhere from five to thirty people. The women raised corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and melons in communal garden plots near the villages. They also gathered such foods as nuts, berries, honey, beeswax, and tubers. Women were responsible not only for growing and gathering food, but also for caring for children, keeping the lodges maintained, and tanning hides. The men hunted deer and other fur-bearing animals for food, clothing, and articles of trade. They also designed and carved canoes and flatboats for transportation. After the horse was introduced in the eighteenth century, men also made saddles and tended the family herds. In the fall and winter seasons, the Mesquakies migrated to the prairies for hunting. Winter-camp lodges were small and made of cattail mats and poles. These oval-shaped structures housed from one to five people and were designed for frequent moves. Trading was done in the winter, when encampments were often large, but in the fall and spring seasons the camps would disperse into smaller groups to ease the hunt for game. During the early 1700s the Mesquakies controlled the main Wisconsin portages that covered the routes from Green Bay to the Mississippi. Demanding fees from those who wanted to travel the routes, the Mesquakies angered the French, the English, and other Native American tribes. For thirty years the tribe fended off these groups, but in 1730, in an effort to salvage what was left of their group, the Mesquakies formed a close alliance with the nearby Sauks. This alliance was strong because both tribes were culturally and linguistically similar. The Mesquakies and the Sauks, along with another woodlands tribe, the Kickapoos, speak varying dialects of an Algonquian language called Sauk-Fox-Kickapoo. Early studies suggest that the three tribes lived in close proximity before European contact and had learned to rely on each other in defending their lands. It was not surprising, then, that the Mesquakies fled to the Sauk tribe and blended easily with them. But this amalgamated group still could not fend off the encroaching Anglo-Americans. Both groups were forced to migrate south, finally settling in an area near the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers in present-day Iowa and Illinois. In 1804 a few Sauk Indians ceded most of their lands to the Americans in a treaty that would further disrupt the Mesquakies. One Sauk band, whose leader was accused of instigating the treaty, broke away from the tribe and became officially recognized by the Americans as "the Sac [a corruption of Sauk] and Fox of the Missouri." Concurrently the remaining group was named "the Sac and Fox of the Mississippi."