The vast North American heartland, which stretches from the Saskatchewan River basin in Canada southward across the United States into central Texas, and from the Mississippi River westward to the Rocky Mountains, is known as the Great Plains. It is an enormous territory, covering nearly one-third of today’s United States, including all or portions of fifteen states and two Canadian provinces.
And it is this immense region that was inhabited by the people who have become the world-wide embodiment of all Native America – the Plains Indians, hunting buffalo on horseback, feather headdresses flowing in the wind. They are the prototype of the American Indian, that bloodthirsty savage and romantic noble warrior all rolled into one improbable figure.
But this picturesque image of the Sioux or Cheyenne warrior racing across the prairie, wildly waving his rifle, is not only a misleading picture of Native America in general, it was just vaguely representative of any of the Plains tribes. The bronze-skinned horseman of popular imagination not only appeared very late on the Great Plains, but he existed for only the briefest of moments. For centuries – perhaps a thousand years or more – before any Europeans ever saw the American prairie, the dominant people of the Plains were not even the nomadic hunters, but more or less sedentary farmers who lived in semi-permanent villages and who hunted only occasionally to supplement their agricultural produce.
When the first white pioneers did arrive on the Great Plains, they found many such farming people still living on the eastern edges of the area. In the lower Red River Valley of Louisiana and Arkansas lived the tribes of the Caddo confederacy, who may have been closely related to the ancestors of the Iroquois. Both people apparently prospered and grew strong in this fertile land and gradually expanded to the north. The Iroquois eventually crossed the Mississippi into the Northeast, while the Caddo remained on the west side of the river. Some of their groups, however, strayed far to the north, and 17th-century white settlers encountered them in Kansas as the Wichita, and in Nebraska as the Pawnee, who by that time had spread out into some twenty villages all along the Platte River.
The Pawnee appeared as a mysterious, and somehow superior people to the other Indian tribes around them and were accorded great respect by them. The Pawnee took a great interest in the heavens, especially in the stars, and their long, intricate ceremonies were dedicated each year to the Morning Star, the Evening Star and several others. But the Pawnee also made practical astronomical observations to determine the proper times for their religious festivals, and to find just the right time for planting maize. More than most American natives, in fact, the Pawnee regarded maize as a gift from the gods. On the other hand, they were also one of the very few people north of Mexico to practice human sacrifice as a part of their religious ceremonies. There was a Supreme Being, who was hidden from human eyes, but who had created the entire world; this Supreme Being never revealed himself to mortal men, but he answered their prayers through lesser deities. And there was Mother Earth, from whom all life sprang. The Pawnee philosophy of life and the universe was so well developed and so highly regarded among other North American natives, that even the Indians of New Mexico told the first Spanish explorers that these were the greatest of all men. But when the Spaniards finally arrived in Pawnee country and saw nothing but half-naked Indians whose language they could not understand, they felt betrayed; to the European adventurers of that time, greatness always meant gold and riches and power.
In the lower Missouri River basin lived several Siouan tribes – the Osage, Missouri, Kansas, Otoe, Omaha, Iowa, and Ponca, all of whom were essentially farmers, but who regularly went out onto the Plains to hunt buffalo – on foot, for in the early days there were of course no horses as yet. All these tribes belonged to the so-called Dhegina branch of Siouans, and had originally lived along the Atlantic coast. Under pressure from white settlement in the early 1600s they moved westward, settling first in the Piedmont between the James and Savannah rivers in Virginia and the Carolinas, then on the Ozark Plateau and the prairies of what is now western Missouri. At this point the tribes separated, the Ponca and the Omaha moving north to Minnesota, where the Sioux once again drove them still farther west into the Dakotas. Only the Osage remained behind in Missouri, where the French encountered them late in the 1600s.
To their north stood the villages of the Hidatsa, a primarily agricultural people who continued the settled ways of the ancient Sioux. The Hidatsa were closely related to the Crow who roamed the western Plains between the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. The Crow, in fact, had separated from the Hidatsa earlier and moved westward after, as legend has it, a dispute over a buffalo. Once out on the Plains, these groups separated again, and the white men would meet them as River Crow and Mountain Crow.
Near today’s Bismarck in North Dakota lived the Mandan, perhaps the dominant people of the Plains before the arrival of the Europeans. The Mandan, much like the Pawnee, performed impressive religious ceremonies, filled with symbolism, including the famous Sun Dance, and they maintained a number of secret societies. Other Sioux tribes, such as the Lakota, for example, called them Miwahtoni, and usually spoke of them in terms of great respect; the Lakota and many of the historic Plains people eventually copied some of the Mandan traditions.
When they were first encountered by the white man, there lived among the Mandan a few albinos, individuals with pale skin and straw-colored hair. American writers of the time immediately jumped to the conclusion that these were descendants of a white race; the advanced culture of the Mandan was indisputable proof that they must have had a European heritage. There was even a Welshman who claimed that he had visited this tribe and found them able to speak fluent Welsh. It must have been a temporary aberration, for later travelers never found them able to speak anything but Mandan.
Despite such widespread admiration for the Mandan people and their civilization, there were to be evil days ahead for them. Long before the white frontier ever reached their lands, smallpox and cholera swept through the Indian country. The diseases did serious damage to many of the nomadic tribes, but once the settled villages became infected, the losses became disastrous. In 1750, there were at least nine large Mandan villages in North Dakota; half a century later there were only two, and the 1,600 survivors were all but wiped out in yet another smallpox epidemic in 1837. Less than fifty Mandan survived that year, and they eventually joined the Hidatsa, with whom their descendants still live.
All these tribes were essentially farming people who lived year round in established villages; only occasionally would they go out on hunting or war expeditions in any kind of resemblance to their nomadic Plains brothers. Their prairie villages were usually built along a river bank, with the lodges clustered close together, the open sides protected by wooden palisades. Throughout most of the Missouri River area, their houses were earth lodges – circular structures of poles, partly underground, and covered with layers of firmly packed earth. The tops of these structures were sometimes flattened to form a platform on which maize was dried and which also served as a cool place on hot summer nights. The interiors of these lodges were spacious enough for an entire family, warm in the winter and cool in the summer, for the thick earthen walls insulated the living areas from temperature extremes. Among the more southern people, such as the Caddo and the Wichita, the lodges were often tall, grass-thatched huts with pointed domes.
Despite the fact that white America early on considered the Plains a desert – the Great American Desert – where no effective crops would ever grow, the Indians of the Plains were able to produce a wide variety of agricultural products, including maize, beans, squashes, pumpkins, sunflower seeds, and even tobacco. They had, in fact, developed several varieties of maize so well adapted to the short growing season that they are still planted by farmers on the northern Plains today. Sunflower seeds were parched and ground into a meal that was used in cooking vegetables and meat dishes; lumps of this same sunflower meal were also carried on expeditions by hunters and warriors.
The work in the fields was done by the women, each working the plots held by her household. The women, much like their Iroquois sisters in the east, also owned the crops and distributed them to the families of the household. The men were strictly warriors and occasional hunters who brought bison and other meat to the village. At least once during each summer a big annual bison hunt was held in which all males of a village cooperated and shared for the benefit of all. It was people like these who dominated life on the Plains for many centuries, until the white man’s arrival disrupted their lives completely.