Both of Shelby County’s area tribes, the Miami and the Shawnee, were of Algonquian stock, the most populous and widely used of the North American Indian linguistic stocks. It included several hundred tribes speaking almost fifty different related languages. Their territory covered an area that extended from south of Hudson Bay in Canada to the Carolinas, from the Atlantic to Montana and Wyoming in large isolated areas. The linguistic stock is named after the Algonquian tribe of Canada, and its best known tribes are the Amalecite, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Conoy, Cree, Delaware, Fox, Gros, Ventre, Kickapoo, Massachuset, Miami, Micmac, Mohegan, Mohican, Montagnais, Musi, Narranganset, Naskaspi, Nipmuc, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Pequot, Potawatomi, Sac, Shawnee, Tete de Boule, and Wampanoag. The major Algonquian confederacies were the Abnaki, Pennacook and Illinois.

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