Fox (people)

Fox (people), also called Mesquakie, North American tribe of the Algonquian language family and of the Northeast culture area. They were called Fox (renards) by the French, possibly because they had a Fox clan, but they referred to themselves as Meskwakihuk (“red-earth people”). Originally from Michigan, the Fox were driven out by enemy tribes in the early 17th century and crossed the Strait of Mackinac to resettle in northeastern Wisconsin. They were agricultural people who raised maize, beans, and squash and in the winter sent hunting parties farther west for buffalo. Nearly wiped out by a war with the French, the Fox were allied with the Sac (Sauk), people in 1733. The Sac, also an Algonquian tribe, originally inhabited Michigan's southern peninsula but migrated to Wisconsin sometime before the arrival of European explorers in the 1600s; later the Sac settled on both banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois and neighboring areas. In 1832 the two tribes resisted the execution of a treaty with the United States by which they had agreed to cede their lands east of the Mississippi (see Black Hawk). Eventually the Fox moved to a reservation in Kansas, but they returned to Iowa in 1859 and bought land in Tama County, where some still live today. In 1990 Sac and Fox descendants numbered 4,517. See also Native American Languages; Native Americans of North America: Northeast.