Corn was the principal crop of the Osages, and supplied about half their food needs. Their supplementary crops were beans, squash, and sunflowers. They caught fish in the rivers, and hunted deer and small game in the woods. Each summer they went out to the plains for buffalo and again in the fall, after the harvest, for winter meat and robes.
The Osages claimed that their ancestors had lived just north of the Ohio River and many years before had moved across into Missouri, where they were identified by Pierre Marquette in 1673. At that time they were firmly established in their villages, which appeared to have been occupied for many years. They were an arrogant, quarrelsome people, with a large number of warriors, and waged almost constant war against several of their neighbors.
Near the end of the seventeenth century the Osages secured horses from the southwest and began using them on the buffalo hunt. Thus they could go farther into the plains in search of the herds and could carry back larger amounts of meat and hides. At about the same time they began to buy guns from the French traders, and with these new weapons they increased their attacks against the Apaches living in the plains to the west.
The noisy new weapons so frightened the Apache warriors that they fled in panic before even a small Osage force armed with five or six guns, leaving their homes and families at the mercy of the enemy, who were not interested in killing people but wanted captives to sell to the French down the Mississippi, who needed slaves for their plantations. As the Osages had no use for the captured lodges, these were plundered and burned, leaving the village a deserted ruin. These attacks from the east were very effective in breaking down Apache resistance, as they coincided with attacks by the Comanches from the west.
The rapid destruction of the Apache villages left a wide area of the plains free from any settlements until the white men came more than a century later to farm the prairie country. In the interval, hunting bands of nomads and seminomads roamed the country unhindered.
The basic pattern of buffalo hunting among the Osages changed very little, but with their horses and their enlarged hunting grounds they had more buffalo, which made for a pleasanter life with less drudgery. Their tipis, weapons, horse trappings, and camping routines were such that a chance traveler meeting them on a hunt would have difficulty in distinguishing them from the true nomads.
Back in their farming villages the Osages still planted their fields in the spring and cared for the crops until the corn had been hoed twice. By then it was tall enough and tough enough that it had little attraction for rabbits and deer. It could be left for a few weeks with little care, although a few villagers probably remained to watch the crops during the summer. Almost the entire population went out on the summer hunt in July and August, returning when the crops were ready for harvesting. After the harvest the people all went hunting again until driven from the plains by the winter storms.
The Osage pattern of development through this period is rather complex, and it is difficult to determine the relative importance of the several factors involved in the changes, but it is evident that the Osages never considered the horse as important in their pattern of living as did many of the other tribes, such as the Comanches and the Cheyennes.
The Osages were in firm possession of farms and permanent villages, and had a substantial supply of basic food in their corn crop. They had little incentive to hunt the buffalo the year around, to follow the herds like true nomads. The Comanches, in contrast, had to become nomads or go hungry much of the time because they were poor farmers on poor land. It was easier for the Comanches to kill surplus meat and tan extra robes to trade for corn than it was to raise their own.
While the Comanches needed large herds of horses and could manage them quite easily, the Osages needed fewer horses and had problems handling those. The Osages had to pasture the animals in the scattered woodlands near their villages, although this meant that the horses got into the crops during the summers and found scant forage among the trees during the winter. It would have been preferable to have pastured the horses on the rich, cured gamma grasses of the plains, but this would have required a strong guard for the herdand the Osages simply did not possess the organizational and governmental skills to form such a guard at this time.
Because of these two important factors, the farming tradition and the problems of maintaining a horse herd, the Osages retained their basic pattern of living and much of their culture pattern. They added an overlay of plains culture, however, the most prominent addition being the tipi, which was used on the hunts, and the cover of which sometimes served as an emergency patch on a permanent lodge. Elaborate costumes for warriors and showy trappings for the horses were borrowed from their nomadic neighbors. They also indulged in the war game, with its system of honors and counting of coups.
Several other tribes with permanent villages and good corn lands followed the same pattern, among them the Pawnee, Omaha, Kansas, Arikara, and Mandan. Tribes with permanent villages but no farming also followed the pattern when they had a good supply of staple food from the salmon runs. These tribes were found in the Columbia Basin, but visited the Montana plains to hunt buffalo. Among them were the Nez Percé, Yakima, Spokane, Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Coeur d'Alene.
It appears, then, that a tribe with a permanent village and a good food supply could be induced to become buffalo hunters for part of each year but wanted to keep their villages to live in during the winter.
The Sioux to the north were also Woodland Indians. They were forced westward by the settlers until, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they became the typical Plains Indians in the minds of most Americans. Their spectacular victory over General Custer and their later appearance in the touring Wild West shows helped imprint their image on the American mind. They were a tall, slim, muscular people with strong features, aquiline noses, and small hands and feet.
The ancestors of these Indians had come from Siberia well in advance of the Uto-Aztecans, possibly more than 2,000 years ago. They skirted the Canadian woods on their way to the southeast and settled in the Ohio Valley north of the river, and one small group penetrated to the tidewater of Virginia. They are classed as the Siouan family group, and include several tribes of the woodland fringethe Iowa, Kansas, Omaha, Osage, Oto, and Poncathat moved west from the Ohio Valley centuries before the first white explorers reached their country. The northernmost of the Siouan tribes, the Sioux proper, were occupying Minnesota and western Wisconsin when they were first visited by the French in 1673.
At the opening of the eighteenth century the Sioux were people of the woodland fringe, living in substantial rectangular houses constructed with heavy timber frames and covered with slabs of bark. Their villages were usually located in open groves near a lake or a river, and they had both good hunting and good fishing close at hand.
The entire Sioux country had small herds of buffalo on the prairies and meadows scattered among the forests and lakes. Much larger bands roamed just to the west where the country was more open, and the western edge of the Sioux lands bordered on the open plains. Thus the Sioux were well supplied with fish, meat, skins, robes, and furs from their own country.
Unlike their cousins to the south, the Sioux did no farming. About half their food intake was supplied by their staple grain crop, wild rice, which could be had in large quantities just for the harvesting. The women paddled into the rice swamps, bent the stalks over the canoe, and beat out the grain with wooden paddles.