Oto Indians

In their own languages the Otoe are Jiwere and the Missouria Nutachi, and the united Otoe-Missouria Tribe is headquartered today at Red Rock, Oklahoma. The Blue River reservation did not hold. Congress arranged the sale of 120,000 acres of it in 1876 and sold the rest in 1881, forcing the people into Indian Territory. The pressure split the tribe into a traditionalist Coyote Band and a Quaker Band. On October 5, 1881, a procession of 320 Otoe-Missouria people set out on foot and walked 18 days to Red Rock, where a single government building stood waiting.

What the plaque says

Oto Indians Prehistoric Indians were the earliest inhabitants of this area. By 1760, the Oto and part of the Missouri Tribe occupied an earth lodge village near here on the west bank of the Platte River, a short distance above the mouth of the Elkhorn. Spanish and French explorers made contact with the Oto during the late 18th century. In July, 1804, men from the Lewis and Clark expe- dition traveled to the Oto village only to find the tribe away on their annual buffalo hunt. When the Indians returned, the explorers held a council with them at a site on the Missouri River which became known as "the council bluffs." During the 1830's, Baptist missionaries Moses and Eliza Merrill worked among the Oto and Missouri. In 1854, the tribes ceded their lands along the Platte and Elk- horn and moved to a reservation on the Blue River near the Nebraska-Kansas border. The present-day community of Yutan is named after Itan, chief of the Oto from about 1830 until his death in 1837. Two Rivers State Recreation Area, at the confluence of two historic waterways, was opened in 1960 by the State Game and Parks Commission. Yutan Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 14 mi
  Two hangar-sized halls beside I-80 near Ashland holding the bombers and reconnaissance planes of the command that ran America's nuclear force from Offutt, south of Omaha, from 1948 to 1992.
• Malcolm X Birthsite — 21 mi
  The North Omaha lot where Malcolm Little was born in May 1925 and his family was driven out by the Klan, saved by Rowena Moore and now planned as a cultural center.
• Joslyn Art Museum — 22 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• Winter Quarters and the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery — 22 mi
  The Latter-day Saint camp of 1846 to 1848 on Omaha land in what is now Florence, where hundreds died the first winter, and the cemetery and trail center beside it.

More markers nearby

• The Yutan Oto Indian Village — 2.2 mi
• Atlas D Missile Site A-1 — 5.1 mi
• Atlas D Missile Site A-1 — 7.1 mi
• New Pennsylvania Cemetery — 8.4 mi