Claude Charles du Tisné (also Dutisné) led the first official French expedition to visit the Osage and the Wichita Indians in 1719 in what became known as Kansas in the present-day United States.

[2] In 1719 his superiors instructed him to visit the Panis or Panioussa (Wichita) and the Padouca (Apache) as a first step toward establishing trade with the Spanish colony of Santa Fe in New Mexico.

He was to make friends with these Indians, who were then unknown except by name to the French, and ensure that they posed no problems to such trade passing through their lands.

They had split from the main Osage tribe a few years earlier and moved to the Missouri River for unknown reasons.

[4] They stopped Du Tisné in his tracks, refusing to allow him and his party to proceed upriver from their village.

He proceeded straight west from Kaskaskia, through the Ozarks region, and after a journey of about 250 miles (400 km), he reached the village of the "Great Osages."

Like the Missouria, the Osage had adopted the practice of the Indians of the plains border of journeying west to hunt buffalo, living in tipis during that time and leaving only the old, infirm, and small children in the village.

Finally, after extensive negotiations in which Du Tisné resorted to threats that the French would suspend trade relations, he was allowed to continue.

[7][8] Finally departing with the grudging permission of the Osage, Du Tisné journeyed to visit the Wichita.

Their two villages were four days and about 100 miles (160 km) away, probably on the Verdigris River near the site of the future town of Neodesha, Kansas.

Du Tisné wrote that the Indians twice threatened him with a tomahawk twice over his head, but he persuaded them that his purpose was peaceful.

The Wichita village—Du Tisné and other Frenchmen called them "Panis," a generic term for the Caddoan people of the plains, and a word that came to also mean "slave"—had 130 houses and 200 to 250 warriors, indicating a population of 1,000 or more.

Du Tisné said that the Wichita, borrowing the concept from the Spanish, armored their horses with leather for war.

Du Tisné noted that both sides practiced ritual cannibalism, which seems to have been a feature of Wichita culture, as was perhaps an occasional human sacrifice.

[13] Du Tisné traded the Wichita three guns, powder, pickaxes, and knives for two horses and a mule with a Spanish brand.

When Du Tisné proposed to continue his journey by visiting the Padouca villages to the west, the Wichita objected.