Powers Bluff, called Tah-qua-kik by Indians, was for some years home to three tribes, the Chippewa, the Potawatomi, and the Winnebago. Local historians say some Potawatomi lived there as early as 1866. They lived on the hilltop beside the rock formations in houses made of log bark and frames, while some lived in tents. Each dwelling had a fireplace in the center of the floor and a hole in the roof to let smoke drift out, with little or no furniture and few cooking utensils. The women did most of the work, making moccasins and beaded trinkets, tanning hides, and weaving baskets of rushes and reeds. Their diet consisted almost entirely of meat, bread, and potatoes, and the braves traveled many miles in search of woodchucks, considered a great delicacy. Powers Bluff offered abundant resources, with the Yellow, Black, and Wisconsin rivers nearby, hard maples for spring sap, pine forests, marsh reeds and grasses for basket weaving, cranberries in the fall marshlands and bogs, plentiful wild fowl and fish, wild rice in the river beds, and mink, muskrats, foxes, beavers, deer, and bear. The Indian village stood in a clearing of about twenty acres on the bluff.