Quapaw — the "downstream people" of the Ohio Valley

In the ancestral split at the Mississippi, those who turned downstream took the name that means roughly "downstream people," while kin moved up the Missouri country.

From that Ohio–Wabash corridor the Quapaw later settled four villages near the Arkansas–Mississippi confluence, where Marquette and Jolliet met them in 1673. Their story is Kentucky's too: another Dhegiha thread that once tied the Bluegrass and Ohio hunting grounds to the wider Mississippi world before European maps renamed the river for them—Arkansas.