by David Treuer
After the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, horses were unleashed on the Plains. Until then they had been more or less exclusively controlled by the Spanish. They thus became both a kind of currency on the Plains and a prime shaper of its landscape. Rather suddenly, the tribes bordering on or living in the Plains—the Diné, Apache, Shoshone, Kiowa, and Pawnee—were horsed and could fight and hunt in ways never before imaginable. All tribes took horses, but perhaps no other tribe took to them like the Comanche.
The Comanche began as Shoshonean people along the North Platte River in Wyoming, having (to judge from their language) migrated up from Mexico over many hundreds of years. When they started acquiring horses in the late seventeenth century, they began pushing east and south in search of bison. Gone, overnight, were the days when the whole tribe had to lure herds into artificial or natural pens or stampede them off cliffs. Now they could pace the bison on horses and shoot arrows with deadly accuracy into their flanks. They could also run roughshod over any other Indians in their way. By 1700, the Comanche had pushed into Oklahoma, New Mexico, and as far south as central Texas. The eastern Apache were directly in their line of travel and expansion and were caught up in devastating wars with the Comanche, ending after a grueling nine-day battle at the Wichita River in 1723. Soon the Comanche had everything: easy access to food, the ability to attack and defend, and a steady influx of captured enemies (including Spanish and New Mexican settlers as well as other tribal people). Their numbers swelled. By the end of the eighteenth century there were about two million wild horses in the “Comancheria” (the new Comanche homelands that included all of West Texas, eastern New Mexico, western Oklahoma, and southwestern Kansas) alone. The Comanche were so skilled at breaking horses that they had in excess of one hundred thousand of them at their disposal at any given time. By the early nineteenth century, the tribe itself numbered forty thousand. Like other tribes, they lacked a central authority or governing body, however; they were split into as many as thirty distinct bands, each with their own hierarchy and leaders.
As heterogeneous as they were, they were universally feared. Texas—first as part of New Spain, then Mexico, then as an independent republic, and finally as a state in the Union—could not protect, or even define, its western border against them. The Comanche raided the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans with relative impunity. They raided and fought all their tribal neighbors as well. The whole of Comancheria as well as surrounding areas was a battleground for the better part of two centuries. (Perhaps it is an axiom of war that where there is enough land and resources for everyone, groups fight the most fiercely to deprive others of that bounty.) Especially during the Civil War, the Comanche, Apache, and others (sometimes in alliance and sometimes acting singly) pushed back the “civilized” frontier hundreds of miles, burning homesteads and seizing cattle and horses and captives. While the story of colonial and subsequently American expansion is largely one of “Westward ho!,” the historical reality shows us (in the Hudson valley, along the Ohio, in New Mexico, and in Texas) that many tribes successfully pushed settlers out and back, and sometimes resettlement took decades, if it happened at all. And who knows? Without these spasms of war, the fates of tribes might have been very different. Many (like the Comanche) were eventually defeated by disease and by the systematic extermination of the buffalo on which they depended. But perhaps the Comanche bought themselves time (as did the Iroquois and Ojibwe and Pueblo people) to prepare themselves for resettlement and the eventual Anglo onslaught, learning ways and means to protect themselves with the time they had bought with blood. The Comanche empire, however, did come to an end when Quanah Parker, leader of one of the larger Comanche bands, capitulated in 1875. By that time their population had dropped from around forty thousand in the mid–nineteenth century to around three thousand in 1874. The Comanche retired to reservations in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma was (and is) a strange exception to the very concept of Indian homelands. Originally (that is, before the 1830s) it had been home to Caddo, Lipan Apache, Kiowa, and Osage, among others. They were mainly agriculturalists to the east and hunter-gatherers to the west, but all of that was upended after the Louisiana Purchase and the creation of “Indian Territory” shortly thereafter. As intended by Thomas Jefferson, “Indian Territory” was a place to relocate all the eastern Indians where they would be out of the way of Jefferson’s imagined army of yeoman farmers. The original territory was vast, but when Indians began to be removed there after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, it was reduced in size almost immediately. Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas territories were quickly excluded. Much reduced, Indian Territory began to resemble present-day Oklahoma in size and shape. Indians were moved there anyway. By 1888 more than thirty tribes from all over the country were resettled in Oklahoma, including Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Seneca, Delaware, Sac, Fox, Ho-Chunk, Creek, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Ponca, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Pawnee. Crowded together, enemies became neighbors, and relocated tribes were forced on those indigenous to the region.
It was a chaotic mess, but it was a homeland of sorts and seemed, at first, more secure than the ones many tribes left behind. It didn’t last. As the cattle industry got under way in Texas in the 1870s and 1880s, Texas ranchers needed a way to get their beef to rail lines in Kansas. Indian Territory was in the way. The cattle drives took place anyway. The passage of the 1889 Indian Appropriations Act sought to undo tribal landownership and replace it with individual ownership of 160-acre parcels. “Surplus” land (which is what the government called the land left over after allotment) did not go back to tribes but was essentially given away to homesteaders. As though the sudden disappearance of Indian land from under their feet wasn’t bad enough, “Sooners” didn’t wait for the official release of the land but rather snuck out onto the prairie and took the best land first. Some tribes, like the Osage, found ways to resist. They originated in the Ohio River valley but were pushed out during the Iroquois Wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and made a new homeland in what is now Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and northeastern Oklahoma. There they became a force to be reckoned with. George Catlin, who traveled among them and painted them in the nineteenth century, said they were “the tallest race of men in North America, either red or white skins; there being . . . many of them six and a half [tall], and others seven feet.” They lost a lot of land in the years leading up to the Civil War, and during the war they variously sided with both the Union and the Confederates. After the war many Osage served as scouts with George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry in wars with the Cheyenne and Arapaho and at the massacre at the Washita River in 1868. Facing removal and reduction, the Osage were forced to sell their reservation lands in Kansas. With the proceeds they bought themselves a new reservation in Oklahoma. This makes them unique among the many Indian tribes facing the growing power of the American republic because they could negotiate from a position of relative strength. One of the conditions of the purchase of new land was that the Osage retained headrights to mineral and underground wealth in the area under their reservation. When oil was discovered there in the late nineteenth century, the Osage stood to profit. In other negotiations, rather than have their treaty annuities and supplies paid to traders who then paid them out to the Indians, the Osage demanded their payments come to them directly. Clearly the Osage were not only militarily and physically strong; they were fierce and effective negotiators as well. And they remain.
The Northern Plains
Perhaps no other homeland—or the tribes that claimed it as such—has come to stand in for the collective history and fate of Indians in North America as the northern Great Plains. Why? In part, it is because the Indians of the northern Plains—Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Lakota, Dakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Cree, Saulteaux, and Plains Ojibwe—lived in one of the last regions of North America to be settled by Europeans. Much of the High Plains was too cold for too much of the year to be
desirable agricultural land, at least at first. Major settlement occurred after 1850, and most of that after the Civil War. Also, the drama on the Plains between 1850 and 1890 threw the question of the young republic into stark relief: Was America a democratic country that respected the rights of individuals, or was it just another greedy power in disguise? The Plains Wars raised the question because for the first time Anglo-Indian conflict was staged for all to see. European settlement also came late enough to connect with emergent print and photographic journalism: as with the Vietnam War, the Plains War was there to see in magazines and newspapers and illustrated weeklies. And finally, the Plains tribes were unusually resistant to the colonizers. Resistance, as we have seen, took many shapes across the United States: canny acculturation, armed resistance, negotiation, retreat, alliance, trade, raiding. But rarely was Indian resistance so widespread, successful, and brutal. Something else also marked it as different: the coming together of two very powerful forces that changed struggle in America more generally—horses and firearms.
Paleo-Indians had been hunting and gathering the northern Great Plains since the last glaciation: killing mammoth, musk oxen, horses, and camels. When the megafauna died off—perhaps because of overhunting, perhaps because of climate change—and an ice sheet crept down from the north, Paleo-Indians traveled its margins and hunted its oases. When the ice sheet retreated some ten to fifteen thousand years ago, they turned their attention to new species—elk, deer, antelope, and bison—and followed the newly emerging waterways that would become the Red, Missouri, Yellowstone, Milk, and Powder Rivers.
There isn’t a lot of archaeological evidence of how the people of the northern Plains lived, because very little record has been left behind and Plains tribes changed so much after the advent of the horse. What we do know from studying Native languages is that tribal offshoots from Mexico, Canada, and the Rocky Mountains trickled out into the vast grasslands and made their lives there. There were no huge settlements or concentrations of population—as today, “flyover country” didn’t support the same density of habitation that could be found elsewhere on the continent. The tribes that emerged from these Paleo-Indians—Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho—lived in small family-centric bands. They were highly mobile, lived in skin-covered teepees, and used travois to haul their belongings from place to place, following the bison. Everything revolved around the bison.
By the fifteenth century there were tribes along the southeastern edge of the Plains who engaged in relatively intensive farming, among them the Caddoan-speaking Wichita, Caddo, and Pawnee. To the west, tribes that might at one point have been agriculturalists bowed to the climate and gave up farming in favor of hunting and gathering. There is evidence of migration even way back then. In their stories, the Algonquian-speaking Cheyenne recount how they lived at one time in a country surrounded by water but followed the vision of one of their tribe and devoted their lives to hunting buffalo, so becoming the Cheyenne of the western Plains. They looked to the Black Hills (and the buffalo that surrounded them) as their birthplace, spiritual home, and spiritual center. The Blackfeet were, similarly, Algonquian-speaking migrants who made a home against the spine of the Rockies. In the early seventeenth century, other migrants began to arrive from the east, refugees from the bloody struggles of the Iroquois and the Great Lakes.
As the Ojibwe and Odawa consolidated their control of the fur trade and of the Great Lakes, they continued to push west and south. Popular history has it that white settlement on the Eastern Seaboard displaced those tribes, and they in turn displaced their westerly neighbors, and so on, a ripple effect from east to west that ended when woodland Indians like the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Dakota were forced out onto the Plains. This is only partly true. There was a kind of ripple effect. But some of the biggest tribes and confederations of tribes—those in the Iroquois Confederacy, the Shawnee of the Ohio River valley, the tens of thousands of Huron, and the majority of the Ojibwe—did no such thing. The Iroquois sheltered in place. The Huron were wiped out and assimilated into other tribes. The Shawnee immolated themselves in conflict with the colonial powers and scattered—some even winding up in Texas. By comparison, the Iroquois Confederacy and confederated Great Lakes Algonquians (Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa), made rich by the fur trade and armed with guns and numbers, expanded their territory and squeezed everyone else out.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Green Bay, Wisconsin, became something like a refugee camp filled with a polyglot collection of tribes fleeing the violence. Sac, Fox, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and even Potawatomi and Menominee lived, farmed, and hunted in the region. But the Ojibwe onslaught was relentless. By the mid–seventeenth century the Ojibwe had pushed into Minnesota. The Ojibwe war chief Waabojiig (White Fisher) allegedly killed more than fifty Dakota warriors in the Saint Croix River valley in one summer war in the late eighteenth century. Around the same time there was a large Dakota village on the shores of Mde Wakan, Spirit Lake (later renamed Mizizaaga’igan by the conquering Ojibwe, and still later known as Mille Lacs). The Ojibwe attacked in 1750 by throwing bags of gunpowder down the smoke holes of the Dakota lodges and killing the residents as they ran out. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara—who along with the Dakota and Lakota had made the woodlands of Wisconsin and Minnesota their home—were overcome and fled out onto the Plains to make a way of life there. The enmity between the Lakota and Ojibwe remained for many years. Cree and Assiniboine were similarly ejected from the boreal forests and waterways of northwestern Ontario.
It wasn’t long, however, before the former woodland people took to the horse, and the Blackfeet followed suit. Around the same time, the French had been making inroads north of the Great Lakes through Canada in their ever-expanding quest for furs. And while the British were loath to arm Indians, the French had no such qualms. Guns were prevalent by the beginning of the eighteenth century and only became more so. Within a few decades of journeying to the Plains, the Blackfeet, Crow, Arikara, Mandan, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Cree, and Assiniboine were armed and horsed. As such they were, for a while, indomitable.
As of the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were more than thirty distinct tribes on the northern Plains, and within them many sub-bands with their own histories and identities. Bucking the trend of large macrocultures (Hopewell, Násaazí, Hohokam) breaking into smaller ones, the horse and the gun bonded together small roving bands into the horse cultures of the Plains. Now, with easy mobility and access to food (no longer would they need to pull their travois with dogs or lie in wait for passing bison), populations swelled. People were better clothed and better fed. Infant mortality went down, life spans increased, birth rates went up. These were boom times. As James Wilson notes, “There is something deeply ironic—though somehow strangely fitting [about Plains ascendancy]. To begin with, far from predating contact, the Plains Indian culture of the nineteenth century was a relatively recent phenomenon which depended, in part, on innovations introduced by Europeans. It would be difficult to find a native group which better exemplified cultural change and adaptation, or one that gave a less accurate image of pre-Columbian America.”
It should also be noted that contrary to popular misconception, tribes didn’t wither in the face of superior European technology, thinking, religion, and culture or merely succumb to European diseases. Rather, in the Plains in particular, tribes showed supreme adaptability, resourcefulness, and creative syncretization. They took what Europeans brought and made it wholly their own. What would have happened, one wonders, if Plains tribes had encountered Europeans on foot, in small groups, without any kind of critical cultural or martial mass? Despite their later losses, the Plains tribes are, quite likely, around today only because they fought—armed with guns and mounted on horses—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
By the early nineteenth century, the Plains tribes were the people we recognize today. They lived on horseback and hunted buffalo. Their ceremonial lives were governed b
y the sacred pipe (given in a vision to them by White Buffalo Calf Woman) and organized into “societies,” each with a different function. While much older ceremonial ways remained, even some from their woodland days centuries earlier, the Siouan and Algonquian tribes of the northern Plains were given new ceremonies that meshed with their new lives, among them the Sun Dance. The horse was the key to this renaissance in Plains cultures. It made everything possible—new art forms, new religions, new societies, and new thinking. It was a time of plenty.
But origins are origins: horses were introduced by the Spanish as weapons of war, and weapons of war they remained. The Lakota introduced a reign of terror on the High Plains, attacking and reducing their Arikara neighbors relentlessly. The Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa never shook their woodland roots: they still lived in earthen villages, farmed the river valleys, and were, as a result, relatively sedentary. This was not such a viable way of life when surrounded by mobile, horsed nomadic hunters. The Lakota also fought their Crow and Pawnee neighbors to the west and south. The Blackfeet quarreled with the Crow as well as the Gros Ventre and Cree. It should be noted that Plains tribes were not described as (or experienced as) unduly warlike by the Spanish when they were first encountered in the seventeenth century. But when the Americans began showing up in force in the early and middle nineteenth century, they were greeted with armies the likes of which had not been seen before on the continent.
It all began well enough. At first all the territory west of the Mississippi (but excluding the Northwest and California and portions of the Southwest) was owned by France. The land passed to the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson lost no time in trying to get the lay of this vast, relatively unknown land by dispatching the Corps of Discovery under the command of Lewis and Clark in 1804. Their expedition was tasked with mapping and exploring the land, finding a way to the Pacific Ocean, and staking a claim to the territory before the Spanish or British could. Their expedition—now part of legend—lasted from the spring of 1804 through September 1806. They covered thousands of miles of territory, traversed mountains, battled weather and starvation and uncertainty, and, rather startlingly, engaged in no bloodshed or strife with the dozens of tribes they met along the way. Nor did the tribes seem keen on fighting the corps. They wanted to bring the Americans into their spheres of knowledge, too, because in one way or another they knew the Americans were a future with which they would most certainly have to contend.