On January 1, 1788, Colonel Jean-François Hamtramck wrote to General Josiah Harmar concerning conditions on what was then the western frontier of the U. S. Hamtramck, a Canadian who had allied with the Americans in the Revolutionary War, was commander of Post Vincennes in present-day Indiana. Among the concerns he expressed to Harmar was the Spanish offer of land to encourage American settlement on the west side of the Mississippi. Specifically, Hamtramck mentioned a village of “Ze-wa-pe-ta” established 30 miles above the mouth of the Ohio River where 40-50 families had settled the previous summer. The correspondence appears in Louis Houck’s “History of Missouri.” However, there is no further mention of the settlement in historic documents. So, exactly what is Zewapeta and where was it?
Zewapeta appears on maps in a location north of Commerce in Scott County, Missouri. Because Commerce is 39 and a half miles north of the mouth of the Ohio, and the locations on maps place Zewapeta at River Mile 41 or 42, the location is too far upstream for Hamtramck’s estimate. Nonetheless, it is only an estimate.
The closest known concentration of early settlers arriving in the area by the time of the Louisiana Purchase was the settlement of Tywappity. The vast fertile river bottom south of Commerce took the name “Tywappity Bottom” from the settlement name, and the area later became “Tywappity Township” of Cape Girardeau County and later Scott and Mississippi counties. Bottomland hardwoods forests of oak and bald cypress, interspersed with prairies and alluvial lakes, dominated Tywappity Bottom at the time. Canebrakes often covered the forest floor, growing up to eight feet tall and described as being impossible to travel except on paths maintained by Indigenous people and animals.
The first settler in Tywappity Bottom who left records was William Smith of Kentucky, who arrived in 1797 opposite Wolf Island and built a tavern, a combination restaurant and motel, for travelers. Lured by the rich farmland, many others followed and received Spanish land grants. Modern maps show these grants as odd-shaped surveys.
Tywappity appears by at least a dozen different spellings in different accounts, including “Theouapita,” "Tywapatia," “Tayatia,” and “Tiwapeta.” Indeed, some interpretations of the Hamtramck letter transcribe the name of the village mentioned as beginning with a “T” and not a “Z.” Most of the early settlers of the area were from the mid-south via Kentucky and Tennessee. These people commonly spoke an Appalachian dialect of English in which speakers often pronounced words ending in “a” with an “e” sound, such that “opera” becomes “opry,” or okra becomes “okry.” It is not hard to imagine “Zewapeta” pronounced as “Zewapety” by these settlers, and the “Z” sound becoming more a “T” sound. Thus, the probable origin of “Tywappity.”
The word “Zewapeta” or its localized version of “Tywappity” is likely a word from one of the Algonquin native languages, likely Shawnee, possibly meaning “point of no return.” This is not in the sense of a place of doom, but implying one is too far to turn back at this point.
So, the village of Ze-wa-pe-ta is likely the better-known early settlement of Tywappity. The site of Tywappity no longer appears on maps, but the place name survives today in the name of a lake built by the Missouri Department of Conservation in 1957 near Chaffee in Scott County—Tywappity Community Lake.
