To increase their crop, the women planted wild rice in any patch of shallow water where the plant did not grow naturally, and in several localities they made a practice of tying up the heads of the maturing rice in bundles of several stalks each and wrapping the heads with strips of hide or bark to keep the birds from pecking out the grain.
This staple grain crop, which needed attention only in late summer, left the Sioux freer for summer hunting than were the corn growers, and they did not have to go so far from their villages to find buffalo. Instead of packing up the whole village and trudging fifty or a hundred miles to the plains, they could live at home and just send the hunters out for a few days at a time. Hence it took quite a bit of pressure to induce them to move out onto the plains as true nomads.
The Sioux were a warlike people. They fought with their neighbors on all sides, but especially with the Crees to the north and the Chippewas to the east. After French traders reached those two tribes about 1670 and supplied them with guns, they used their new weapons in a strong attempt to drive the Sioux from their homes.
Stubbornly and reluctantly the Sioux gave ground, and as early as 1700 the large Teton band had been pushed west into the open plains, where they held a strip of the Dakotas about a hundred miles wide. Their westward movement was checked there by the powerful Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa living in large farming villages along the Missouri River.
About 1750 the Teton Sioux secured their first horses. Then their life on the plains became easier and richer, and other Sioux bands, the Oglala and Hunkpapa, partly attracted by the Teton success and partly pushed by their enemies, also moved out to the plains. There probably was an increase in population among the Sioux at this time, adding to the pressure for westward expansion. By 1800 about half the tribe had become true nomads, following the buffalo herds the entire year. They had reached the Missouri in two places, ready for further expansion to the west when the opportunity offered.
The Sioux remaining in the woodland villages also secured horses and used them on summer hunts, but they still lived in their permanent houses, harvesting wild rice, until forcibly ejected from the lake country by the advancing farming frontier in the 1860's.
It is evident from this division of the Sioux, lasting over half a century, that the ownership of horses and easy access to the buffalo herds were not enough to lure a settled people with a dependable grain supply to abandon their homes and become wanderers on the open plains. Instead, they spent the summer in traveling, living in tipis and following the buffalo, but when the first snows blew in from the north they were happy to return to their snug houses and ample supply of firewood.
The Siouan corn growers to the south had much the same pattern of living, keeping their winter homes and hunting in the summer. Although many people consider them as Plains tribes, they remained only seminomadic. This group included the Iowa, Kansas, Omaha, Osage, Oto, and Ponca. Their neighbors, the Pawnees and Wichitas of the Caddoan family, were also corn growers and followed the same pattern.
The Cheyennes were closely related to the Sioux and followed a similar pattern. When the Cheyennes were driven from their farming villages along the Iowa-Wisconsin border, they secured horses and turned to buffalo hunting for a living. In less than fifty years they had become true nomads, ranging throughout the western part of the Platte River drainage upstream from the junction of the North and South Platte forks in Nebraska.
8. The Blackfeet
The profile of a plains Indian is fittingly placed on the obverse side of the "buffalo" nickel, the two being emblematic of life on the Great Plains before the coming of the white settlers. The Indian, Blackfoot chief Two Guns White Calf, with his strong face and aquiline nose, is to millions of Americans the typical Indian of the plains. The stately Blackfeet can still be seen in war bonnets and buckskin in the parades and ceremonies at Glacier National Park each summer. Here Blackfoot place names dot the land and Blackfoot traditions and legends abound.
This popular concept uniting the Blackfeet and the buffalo is based on a solid historical foundation, for 150 years ago the tribe claimed a large tract of the finest buffalo range in the west. At that time the Blackfeet were a proud, powerful, warlike people vigorously engaged in a program of aggression and conquest to find living space for their increasing population.
Initially the Blackfeet were a small, weak people, the tag end of a large migration of Algonquin-speaking people moving from Siberia to the woods of northern Canada and on to the southeast. The Blackfeet reached the Mackenzie River country about 500 B.C. and later were pushed across the river into the deep woods by a new migration, the Uto-Aztecans. When the last of these, the Shoshoni, had passed on to central Alberta, the Blackfeet returned to the west bank of the Mackenzie and followed closely behind.
In the northern woods the Blackfeet had lived entirely on game.
This had forced them to break up into small family groups wandering widely in their hunting and finding only a bare subsistence, with periods of want a common thing and starvation always a threat. When they moved south to the valley of the North Saskatchewan River, they found more open country, with conifers still growing on the hills and ridges but groves of aspen and thickets of willow along the lakes and rivers, and many open stretches of good pasture. In these glades small bands of buffalo ranged, a more abundant meat supply than these hunters had ever known in the deep woods. All they needed to secure plenty of meat was to devise some fairly safe, effective way of killing the animals.
At first the Blackfeet found their surest and safest hunting during the winter blizzards. Then the buffalo sought shelter in the patches of timber, where a large band of hunters, approaching downwind yelling and waving their robes, could sometimes stampede the herd, driving it in a blinding rush into the open and possibly into deep drifts on the lee slopes, or onto a lake, its surface swept bare by arctic gusts. In either case the huge beasts were helpless for a time and easy prey to the hunters' spears and arrows.
In the summer it was possible at times to find a small band of buffalo that could be surrounded by a ring of people and could be kept milling in a tight bunch while the hunters dashed up and shot a few before the herd could run for safety, scattering their tormentors, perhaps trampling a few in the rush.
Both these methods had defects. Too often the buffalo refused to be at the right place at the right time, and in a herd small enough to handle. Luck was a big factor in placing a herd upwind of drifts or an ice-covered lake. In the surround the herd might break through the line of hunters at the first sign of danger, and once they started running, they could not be turned. In searching for a surer, safer method of killing more buffalo, the Blackfeet developed a corral or pound for entrapping them. This was called a piskin, and the basic idea of it was probably used long before the hunters came to the plains.
Early Europeans who came to the Blackfoot country were impressed with the piskin. Here is an eyewitness account of one:
It is a circle fenced round with trees laid one upon another, at the foot of a hill about 7 feet high and a hundred yards in circumference; the entrance on the hill-side where the animals can easily go over, but when in cannot return; from this entrance small sticks are laid on each side like a fence, in form of an angle extending from the pound; beyond these to about 1 1/2; mile distant buffalo dung or old roots are laid in heaps, in the same direction as the fence. These are to frighten the beasts from deviating from either side.
This piskin was built in the mouth of a small draw so that the buffalo approaching it would find a natural pathway leading down the slope to the opening. The logs forming the fence were lashed to large posts set in the ground on the outside. Sharpened stakes rested on the bottom log, their butts braced against the ground outside, their points projecting inside at about the height of a buffalo's ribs. These stakes helped prevent the trapped herd from jamming against the fence and pushing it over.