By "Mahars" we must understand that the Omahas were meant.

We shall come across other such instances in which the strangers mistook the pronunciation of Indian names.

For example, Kansas was by them misspelled as "Canseze" and "Canzan;" and there appear some thirteen or fourteen different spellings of Sioux, of which one of the most far-fetched is "Scouex." The explorers were now in a country unknown to them and almost unknown to any white man.

On the thirty-first of May, a messenger came down the Grand Osage River bringing a letter from a person who wrote that the Indians, having been notified that the country had been ceded to the Americans, burned the letter containing the tidings, refusing to believe the report.

The Osage Indians, through whose territory they were now passing, were among the largest and finest-formed red men of the West.
Their name came from the river along which they warred and hunted, but their proper title, as they called themselves, was "the Wabashas," and from them, in later years, we derive the familiar name of Wabash.