The Thunderbird of the St. Joseph River Valley: One Spirit, Many Peoples

The St. Joseph River valley. On a summer night a storm comes off Lake Michigan and rolls up the St. Joseph. The sky goes white. Then the thunder comes. The first peoples of this river knew what was passing over. The Thunderers were flying: giant birds who lived above the sky, whose eyes flashed lightning, whose rain made the corn grow, and who were always at war with a horned being that lived under the water.

Almost no one wrote down what the people of this valley said about them while they lived here. The records we have were made at Fort Wayne, at Harbor Springs, in Wisconsin and Kansas, and in the letters of French priests. This page follows those records people by people, says who wrote each one down and when, and marks where the popular story goes past them.

Where the record was made

ReadingThat is the honest limit of this story. Nobody wrote down what the peoples of this valley said about the thunder while most of them still lived here. The nearest records are what the Miami told an American official at Fort Wayne in 1824, what an Odawa historian printed at Harbor Springs in 1887, and what the Prairie Potawatomi, kin of the St. Joseph Potawatomi who speak the same language, told a Milwaukee curator in Kansas in 1923.

DocumentedOne record was written at the fort itself. The Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix stayed at Fort St. Joseph in the late summer of 1721, and on 8 September he finished a long letter there about the beliefs of “the Indians of Canada” in general. Some of them, he wrote, “mention a god of the waters,” and he added a line we will come back to: “They throw into the rivers and lakes tobacco or birds, which have been strangled, in order to render the god of the waters propitious.”

Who lived on the St. Joseph

DocumentedThe Miami are the first people the written record puts on the river. A French account of about 1680 places their chief village on the St. Joseph, and the Handbook of American Indians says that in 1703 “their chief settlement was still on St Joseph r.” At Fort Wayne in 1824, Charles C. Trowbridge wrote that the Miami told him “they sprung up at St. Joseph’s,” and that their first removal was to Fort Wayne, “where they were found by the french.”

DocumentedThe river was shared. One of Trowbridge’s Miami informants, Le Gros, told him that “Awaandeeoanee Tauwaunee (a peace tree) was once planted upon the St. Joseph’s, by the Chippeways, Ottawas, Potawatamies and Miamies. It was a white poplar.”

DocumentedThe Jesuit mission on the river was founded about 1688 “among the Potawatomi,” and the French fort near today’s Niles about 1691. By the close of the 1600s, the Handbook says, the Potawatomi were settled on the St. Joseph “in territory that had previously been held by the Miami.” Most of the Potawatomi of the valley were removed west between 1838 and 1840. Some families stayed in southwest Michigan, and Potawatomi people live in the valley today.

DocumentedThe people call themselves Neshnabé, plural Neshnabék, “our name for ourselves,” as the Citizen Potawatomi Nation’s language column puts it. The name Potawatomi likely comes from Bodwéwadmi, built on the verb “to build a fire”: the people who build the fire, often asked to keep the fire at gatherings of related nations.

ReadingOne name needs sorting out. The French called a people west of Lake Michigan the Mascoutens, the “Fire Nation,” and that is who the Jesuits meant in the 1600s. Skinner used the same old name for the Prairie Potawatomi in the title of his book. They are not the same people, though the Prairie Potawatomi lived among and absorbed some of them.

Ten winged men and a horned serpent

DocumentedThe Miami name for the thunder being is ciinkwia, writes David Costa, the linguist of the Myaamia Center at Miami University, the research arm of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. In 1824 Trowbridge wrote the same word “Tshingweyau,” and the young thunder beings “Tshingwiizaukee.”

DocumentedHis notes hold a story of them. A Miami hunter, Trowbridge was told, looked up and “saw coming towards him ten, very large, winged animals apparently half birds, half men. Each of them was armed with an immense Pukemaugun or War Club.” They were young thunder spirits on their way to kill a monster in the water. The last of them gave the hunter a feather from his right wing, and he flew with them.

“A wonderful serpent, of immense size, of black colour and having on his head two horns as large as those of the Elk.”

DocumentedThe thunder beings’ clubs had no effect on it. In the story it was the Miami man who gave it the death wound. A second version, from the Wea, a division of the Miami, has the “Young thunder spirits” attacking “an enormous Monaatoo” with “large horns like an Elk.” In a third, a man who flew with them could not help showing off: “every village he came to he winked, & the lightning, from his eyes so frightened the inhabitants” that the thunders left him behind and took back his feather.

DocumentedTrowbridge also wrote down a Kickapoo story, in which an old man who helped a war party revealed at last that “he was (Tshingweyau) the Thunder” and that “they might rely upon his assistance in all their warlike undertakings.”

DocumentedAnd the smallest bird of all is kin to the biggest. “The Miami-Illinois word for ‘hummingbird’, neenimehkia,” Costa writes, “is clearly related to the word for ‘thunderbird’” in the languages next door: Meskwaki nenemehkiwa, Shawnee nenemhki, Ojibwe animiki.

Our grandfathers, the thunders

DocumentedMost of what is known of the Potawatomi Thunderbird comes from one book in three parts: The Mascoutens or Prairie Potawatomi Indians, by Alanson Skinner of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee. Skinner worked among the Prairie Band in Kansas in 1923, near Mayetta, and printed what he learned in the museum’s Bulletin in 1924 and 1927. The Potawatomi he met were the descendants of people who had lived on the prairies west and south of Lake Michigan, and kin to the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph, who spoke the same language.

DocumentedSkinner set the Thunderbirds down in his account of the Potawatomi gods: “The Thunderbirds, called Wämigohûk or Nêm’kihûk, are the usual giant eagles of the Central Algonkian. They dwell above the sky in the empyrean, and flash lightning from their eyes. They destroy the underworld horned-panthers whenever possible. They are war-gods and rain-gods.”

DocumentedThe Forest County Potawatomi dictionary keeps the old way of speaking of them. Its entry wawasmowek, “they (thunders) make lightning,” comes with an example sentence: Wawasmowek gi gmeshomsenanek, “Our grandfathers (the thunders) are lightning.” Skinner heard the same courtesy given to fire, which the Prairie people called “Grandfather.”

DocumentedSkinner thought these woven Thunderbirds “a very ancient pan-Algonkian concept.” On the Menomini bags, he wrote, the figures “represent the Thunderers,” and their presence on anything is “a prayer to gain the protection of these deities.”

DocumentedThe Potawatomi Thunder clan told how it began, and Skinner wrote the story down. A man named Thagwa’skuk, “Throwing-out-water,” lost his wife and children and went into the woods to die. He blackened his face and fasted. Then he dreamed that water fell in his mouth, and a great bird came and hovered over him: “when it rolled its eyes, lightning flashed. ‘This must be a Thunderer,’ he thought, ‘come to eat my dead body.’” But the bird had come to pity him.

DocumentedIt came back in green feathers, the color of the sky, renamed him Mîsîkwa’kä, “The-icicle,” and told him how to make a sacred bundle and found a clan. He was to tell his people: “The thunder will wash out your trail with rain, raise the streams behind you so that the enemy cannot cross to follow you.” And: “the Thunder is our father, and will keep our enemies from running over us.”

DocumentedTo prove his dream, Icicle had himself sealed in a decked-over birch-bark canoe and staked under the water of a lake overnight. On the second morning the canoe was hauled out and cut open, and he was alive. He named his helper the “Thunder-rain-bird,” “because he is the one who wets this earth for us so that everything grows.” His son was named “Hear-the-noise,” for the noise of the thunder.

DocumentedAt a feast in Kansas, a speaker gave thanks in a list that puts the thunder among the great powers of the world: “I thank all the Powers, Wind, Thunder, Water, fall, summer, spring, winter.”

The Thunder clan

DocumentedThe Thunderers had their own people on earth. When the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan listed the clans, or gentes, of the Potawatomi in Ancient Society (1877), the Thunder was the tenth of fifteen.

DocumentedThe Handbook of American Indians took Morgan’s word into its own pages: “Chekwa (prob. from ching’wă, ‘thunder rolls’). Given by Morgan … as the Thunder gens of the Potawatomi.”

Reading“Chequah,” the spelling that turns up on websites, Native Languages of the Americas among them, as the Potawatomi name for the Thunderbird, looks to be Morgan’s clan name of 1877 passed from book to book. It names the clan of the thunder. We have found no older source that uses it for the bird itself.

DocumentedIn the clan’s own story, its first members were men whose names came from the thunder: Yellow Thunder, Little Thunder, Thunder and Piercing-sound. Skinner found the clan still keeping its rites in Kansas.

DocumentedThe clan’s dead were treated differently from anyone else’s. Members of the Thunder clan, Skinner wrote, “are buried on a hilltop, the corpses being seated upright,” covered with a little wooden house or a cairn of stones. They were dressed only in breechcloth and moccasins, wrapped in red blankets, and their faces painted “one-half red, and one-half yellow.”

DocumentedA Thunder clan man named Cold-mist offered Skinner a Thunder clan bundle. Its principal piece was “a rather massive carved wooden bird on a stake, intended to represent the thunder-bird and to be stuck up in the ground during the clan ceremony.” Skinner printed the clan’s chants as well; we leave their words to the clan. The first of them speaks of setting out to wet the earth, fill the creeks and water the people.

DocumentedThe May-apple, “a sweet herb sacred to the thunder,” was sung in the clan’s songs, and pickerel was eaten at its feasts because a fish of the water belongs with rain, “and hence thunder.” The ivory-billed woodpecker, “the one who calls for the rain,” was said to be related to the Thunderbird.

“We have seen the Thunder!”

DocumentedThe Prairie Potawatomi year, as Skinner recorded it in Kansas, began with the thunder. As the spring storms drew near, the Prairie Band gathered, made new mat houses and set guards to watch the west, day and night. Skinner: “When lightning is first seen the guards run to the ceremonial leader of the year, and inform him, saying, ‘We have seen the Thunder!’ Even though this be in the middle of the night, the women and children at once rise.” The men swept the lodges and put out every fire; a new fire was made with a bow drill, and every family in the village lit its own from it. Then the bundles were opened and the first feasts of the year began.

DocumentedIt is old. Writing of the nations of the mission west of Lake Michigan, the Mascoutens or “Fire Nation” among them, the Jesuit Claude Dablon reported in his Relation of 1679 that they offered “almost constantly sacrifices to the sun, to the thunder, to bears, to the wild ox.” Skinner quoted it to show how long the rites had gone on.

DocumentedThere were rules for staying on the Thunder’s good side. Fire was “Our Grandfather,” and the white man’s fire was not pure: throw burned matches into the lodge fire, Skinner was told, and the fire would be spoiled, and “the house may then be struck by lightning.” Among the Forest Potawatomi of northern Wisconsin, men who had dreamed of the Thunder carried crooked staffs as their war insignia, and small war clubs and miniature lacrosse sticks were kept as “emblems of the Thunder.”

The enemy below

DocumentedBelow the Thunderers is their enemy. Skinner: “There is also an evil power in the water, who possesses the ability to pass through the earth as well as its natural element. This is the great horned Water-panther, called Nampe’shiu, or Nampeshi’k. It is at constant war with the Thunderbirds. When one appears to a man he will become a great warrior.” Such panthers, he was told, drown people, who are found afterward with mud in their mouths, eyes and ears, and one of them had its den at a place called Mänä’wa, which Skinner identified as Milwaukee.

DocumentedSkinner added a detail that many retellings miss: “The Prairie Potawatomi do not seem to have had any belief in the horned serpent of other Central tribes.” Their underwater enemy was a panther with horns, not a snake. Snakes they called Mänîtu’wûk, spirits, and did not want near the lodge, “as lightning often strikes places where they lurk.” A snake that was seen was offered tobacco and coaxed away.

ReadingSo the two nearest records disagree. The Miami of 1824 told of a horned serpent; the Prairie Potawatomi of 1923, of a horned panther. Which one the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph knew, no record says.

DocumentedCharlevoix, writing at Fort St. Joseph in 1721, knew the being too. Some peoples, he wrote, “mention a god of the waters,” and “this god is according to some, the great Tyger.” His editor of 1923 explained that representations of this water spirit “were sometimes called tigers or panthers from their peculiar shape.” The god of the waters is the one, Charlevoix wrote, to whom people threw “tobacco or birds, which have been strangled” into the rivers and lakes.

DocumentedFifty years earlier, on Lake Superior in 1670, a Jesuit heard that a storm might be the work of Thunder, “and others that it was a certain Spirit whom they call Missibizi, who passes among these peoples for the God of the waters.” The Odawa writer Andrew J. Blackbird gave the god of the deep a court of “sea-serpents, water-tigers, and every kind of monster of the deep.”

ReadingMissibizi is very likely the being the Ojibwe today call Mishibizhiw, the great lynx of the water, though the Jesuit does not describe it.

DocumentedThe war could take sides among people too. In a Thunder clan story recorded by Skinner, men of the clan found underwater bears on an island; their leader opened his sacred bundle, took out two arrows and shot them “through the water right into the neck of the bear.” In a war-bundle story, a faster who had dreamed of the panther described how “the Thunderers attacked us, but their lightnings glanced off the sharp rocks that his lodge is made of.”

ReadingThe Thunderers are not simply good in these stories, and the panther is not simply evil. The panther gives power to those who dream of it, and the Thunder clan goes to war by the Thunder’s gift. John R. Swanton warned in the Handbook of American Indians in 1910 that “certain writers have unwarrantably deduced a mystic significance from this, such as the war between light and darkness or good and evil.” Much that is written about the Thunderbird online still does exactly that.

The man who stole a Thunderbird’s wings

DocumentedOne of the tales Skinner collected in Kansas reads like an adventure. Four old men gathering wood saw “immense birds, far bigger than eagles” take a running deer and carry it into the mountains. They warned the chief. A boastful man named Mataukapiu laughed at them, and the old men answered:

DocumentedThe birds took one of the camp’s colts. Mataukapiu sewed himself a suit of buckskin with rawhide between the layers and a fur cap, and let the great bird seize him. It carried him to its nest on the mountaintop, where he killed the young with his spear and both old birds with his club. Then he skinned one of the great birds, stretched it over a stick across its wings, prayed to Wi’sakä, and jumped. “He went down faster than he had expected, but he found that he could control his fall.” He landed in a treetop and walked back to camp carrying the birds. Some of the chiefs thought they were young Thunderers; others called them Mitcipaniawenat, “Birds-that-have-power-to-carry-prey.”

DocumentedSkinner thought it “an ancient Algonkian tale of a man who visited the Thunderbird’s nest,” with a later war story joined to it.

Around the lakes

DocumentedThe Odawa historian Andrew J. Blackbird of Harbor Springs, Michigan, set down the old teachings of his people in 1887. The fourth of them reads:

“Thou shalt not mimic or mock the thunders of the cloud, for they were specially created to water the earth and to keep down all the evil monsters that are under the earth, which would eat up and devour the inhabitants of the earth if they were set at liberty.”

DocumentedIn Ojibwe, animikii is “a thunderbird, a thunderer,” and binesi, “a bird of a large species,” also means a thunderbird. In William Jones’s Ojibwe stories, printed in 1919 in the people’s own words, the Thunderers in their nest are two great birds, and “it was like the play of fire as (the birds) opened and closed their eyes.” Jones added that Thunderers “are generally referred to as ‘grandfathers,’” as the Potawatomi still say.

DocumentedCharlevoix passed through Green Bay in 1721 too. Of the nations there he wrote: “Their principal divinities are the sun and thunder.”

DocumentedThe Menominee, Skinner wrote, believed that “only the incessant warfare waged by the Thunderers upon the Powers Below prevents their constant appearance on earth to the bane of men.” They treated small round pebbles as thunderbolts, or the Thunderers’ eggs, and a Jesuit of 1673–74 described a Menominee healer who ran into a storm, “crying aloud and invoking the thunder.”

DocumentedAcross Lake Michigan the pattern holds. The Sauk and the Meskwaki (Fox) each had a Thunder clan in Morgan’s list. William Jones, recording Meskwaki stories in 1907, explained that thunder “is the noise made by manitou beings of the air; that the lightning is fire issuing from their mouths; and that these beings assume various forms, often those of birds.” He gave the Thunder clan’s name as Wamigohag, “they of feathers,” and printed the story of a faster who saw a water manitou crawl out to sun itself on a rock just as a Thunderer came. At the manitou’s plea, the man shot the Thunderer, and the manitou dragged it down into the water.

Sky and water, people by people

DocumentedPut the words side by side and the family shows. Miami ciinkwia, “thunder being.” Potawatomi Che’-kwa, the Thunder clan in Morgan’s list, which the Handbook traced to ching’wă, “thunder rolls.” Meskwaki has both neneme’kiwa, Thunderer, and a second word, tcigwawa, which one of Michelson’s Meskwaki informants “preferred immeasurably to the other.” “There is some evidence to show that Prairie Potawatomi has an exact equivalent,” Michelson added in 1930, “but the evidence is not altogether satisfactory.” Ojibwe animikii, Odawa au-ne-me-kee, Potawatomi Nêm’kihûk.

ReadingTwo families of words run through the lakes: one like ciinkwia and Che’-kwa, the rolling of thunder, and one like animikii and neneme’kiwa, the thunderer. We are not linguists, and we offer this as an observation, not a finding. It suggests why “Chequah” sounds right to people who know the Miami and Potawatomi words.

The monster that grew wings

DocumentedThe Illinois, south of the valley, were the first of these peoples to have their faith written down. In 1670 Marquette wrote of them: “They worship the Sun and Thunder.” Charlevoix, among the Illinois in October 1721, found thunder explained two ways, “some taking it to be the voice of a particular species of men, who fly in the air, while others imagine this noise proceeds from certain unknown birds.”

DocumentedIn 1673, going down the Mississippi with Louis Jolliet, Marquette saw on the bluffs above today’s Alton, Illinois, “two painted monsters which at first made Us afraid, and upon Which the boldest savages dare not Long rest their eyes. They are as large As a calf; they have Horns on their heads Like those of deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard Like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body Covered with scales, and so Long A tail that it winds all around the Body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a Fish’s tail.”

ReadingMarquette describes no wings and no bird. Horns, scales and a fish’s tail belong to the beings of the water, not the sky.

DocumentedThe Illinois historian William McAdams owned a pen-and-ink sketch inscribed “Made by Wm. Dennis, April 3d, 1825” and titled “Flying Dragon,” which, he wrote in 1887, “was the common name for it” before John Russell’s story of the “Piasa” appeared in 1836. Russell’s story, of a bird that devoured men, is the one most people know. McAdams also printed an account of 1838 that Sauk and Meskwaki delegations passing down the river fired their rifles at the figure.

ReadingThe monster at Alton was probably never a Thunderbird. It belongs with the horned serpent of the Miami and the horned panther of the Potawatomi, on the water’s side of the story. Its wings came from settlers’ drawings and Russell’s tale.

Story or record?

The Thunderbird is popular, and popular subjects collect claims. Here are some we tried to confirm.

OpenThat a Thunderbird’s direct gaze kills. This is said widely of the Potawatomi Thunderbird online. We have not found it in any source on this page. In the clan’s own story, the Thunderbird looks at a dying man and saves him.

ReadingThat the Thunderbird takes off its feathers like a blanket, or has a second head on its belly. We have found nothing like either in the records of the valley’s peoples.

DocumentedThat travelers offered tobacco to the water. Charlevoix, writing at Fort St. Joseph in 1721, says the peoples he knew threw “tobacco or birds” into “the rivers and lakes” for the god of the waters. He was writing of the Indians of Canada in general, not of the St. Joseph peoples by name, and he says nothing of French traders joining in.

ReadingThat bird-shaped effigy mounds are Thunderbirds. The effigy mounds of Wisconsin and Iowa include many birds, and Skinner himself saw a likeness between the woven Thunderbirds and “the bird tumuli.” The National Park Service places the effigy mounds in the Late Woodland period, roughly 1,400 to 750 years ago, and calls them sacred sites. Reading the birds as Thunderbirds is reasonable, but it is a reading.

DocumentedThat Michigan has Thunderbirds in stone. It does. The Sanilac Petroglyphs in the Thumb, Ezhibiigaadek Asin, “written on stone,” the largest group of Native rock carvings in the state, include a Thunderbird, says the Michigan History Center. The site is a sacred one, co-managed with the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan.

DocumentedThat giant birds still fly over the Midwest. On 25 July 1977 at Lawndale, Illinois, a ten-year-old boy was reported to have been lifted by one of two huge black birds. That is a modern report, not a tradition.

Play along

Here are ten things people say about the Thunderbird of this valley. For each, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the sources show.

Thunder’s wives

DocumentedThe Miami still mark the first thunder. “Following the first thunderstorm of the year,” George Ironstrack of the Myaamia Center wrote in 2021, “peepoonki ‘winter’ has come to an end and neepinwiki ‘summer’ has begun,” and the community turns from “wintertime activities, like the telling of Winter Stories.”

The record of the Thunderers in this valley is thin, and most of it was written far away. But each spring the first storm still comes up the St. Joseph. For the Miami it still ends the winter, and the season for winter stories is over. That night the spring peepers start calling in the wet ground. The Miami name for them is ciinkwia awiiwali: Thunder’s wives. Listen for them after the next storm.

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “The Thunderbird of the St. Joseph River Valley: One Spirit, Many Peoples,” Project Scroll, projectscroll.com/news/the-thunderbird-of-the-st-joseph-river-valley/, first published 2026. Corrections are welcome.