For at least two centuries, 1600-1800, the valley was in constant turmoil as tribe after tribe came in and fought for land. Whole tribes were destroyed by merciless enemies, leaving waste lands to be occupied by newcomers from the north. In all this fighting in the seventeenth century, the Iroquois were the chief aggressors. From their point of vantage in upper New York State they secured guns from the Dutch traders along the Hudson River, and used the new weapons with deadly effect against the tribes to the west. First they wiped out the large Erie tribe along the south shore of Lake Erie, then extended their power ever westward, levying tribute on each conquered tribe in turn until their war parties reached the Mississippi, and even the Illinois had to bow to their demands. The Iroquois sent one large war party west of the Mississippi to attack the Pawnees. In time the Iroquois' many campaigns wore them down. After 1700 they lacked the manpower to dominate the western lands and withdrew into their own borders.
New tribes came into the Ohio Valley on the heels of the Iroquois withdrawal. The Shawnees, driven from central Tennessee, moved northward in several scattered groups, which then combined to dominate much of Ohio until Mad Anthony Wayne defeated them soundly in 1793-95. The Shawnees then moved west into Indiana, only to be crushed in 1811 by General William Henry Harrison.
Other tribes moved south from Michigan and Wisconsin. A few had come in even before the Iroquois conquest, the chief of these being the Illinois. They were followed later by the Sauk, Fox, Ottawa, Huron, Miami, Potawatomi, and Kickapoo, each anxious to settle on the good corn land. All this movement of the many tribes and their constant struggles with one another made the Ohio Valley undesirable and unsafe for white farmers until the campaigns of Wayne and Harrison opened up the whole country to the Mississippi.
The buffalo bands from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi were all destroyed during this hectic period, most being killed by Indian hunters. When the white settlers finally crossed the mountains, they found only a few herds, small and widely scattered, in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The whites slaughtered these in short order, and the United States was without a buffalo herd until President Jefferson bought Louisiana, and with it the Great Plains with buffalo numbering many millions.
The remnants of the Indian tribes from the Ohio country moved west ahead of the farming frontier, crossing the Mississippi into Iowa, southeastern Missouri, and eastern Kansas. In their new homes the buffalo were more plentiful than in the old, and some of these Indians continued as buffalo hunters for another half century.
10. The Golden Age of the Plains Indians
Lieutenant Lawrence Kip, at the Walla Walla Council in 1855, reported:
We saw them approaching on horseback in one long line. They were almost entirely naked, gaudily painted and decorated with their wild trappings. Their plumes fluttered about them, while below, skins and trinkets and all kinds of fantastic embellishments flaunted in the sunshine. Trained from early childhood to almost live upon horseback, they sat upon their fine animals as if they were centaurs. Their horses, too, were arrayed in the most glaring finery. They were painted with such colors as formed the greatest contrast, the white being smeared with crimson in fantastic figures, and the dark colored streaked with white clay. Beads and fringes of gaudy colors were hanging from the bridles, while the plumes of eagle feathers interwoven with the mane and tail, fluttered as the breeze swept over them, and completed their wild, fantastic appearance.
When about a mile distant they halted, and half a dozen chiefs rode forward…. Then on came the rest of the wild horsemen in single file, clashing their shields, singing and beating their drums as they marched past us. Then they formed a circle and dashed around us, while our little group stood there, the center of their wild evolutions. They would gallop up as if about to make a charge, then wheel round and round, sounding their loud whoops….
The above describes a large delegation to a treaty council. The following by Francis Parkman describes a parade in an Indian camp:
Suddenly the wild yell of the war-whoop came pealing from the hills. A crowd of horsemen appeared, rushing down their sides, and riding at full speed toward the village, each warrior's long hair flying behind him in the wind like a ship's streamer. As they approached the confused throng assumed a regular order, and entering two by two, they circled the area at a full gallop, each warrior singing his war song as he rode. Some of their dresses were superb. They wore crests of feathers, and close tunics of antelope skins, fringed with scalp-locks of their enemies; many of their shields, too, fluttered with the war eagle's feathers. All had bows and arrows at their backs; some carried long lances. A few were armed with guns. The White Shield, their partisan, rode in gorgeous attire at their head, mounted on a black-and-white horse….
The warriors rode three times around the village; and as each noted champion passed, the old women would scream out his name, to honor his bravery, and excite the emulation of the younger warriors….
Although the two parades were staged by two quite different tribes, the Nez Percé and the Oglala Sioux, a thousand miles apart, the similarity of the pageantry is striking. Both parades are good examples of the highly stylized, elaborate plains culture that came to full flower early in the nineteenth century. For six decades the nomadic tribes basked in its effulgence, while the seminomads on the fringe of the plains carefully copied much of its color.
This gorgeous hybrid culture owed its firm economic base to the vast herds of buffalo, which supplied an abundance of food, robes, and hides for comfort, and a large amount of leisure time that could be used to expand and enrich the whole culture pattern.
But this culture could not flower until pollinated by contributions from the encroaching Europeans. The mobility of the tribes and their ability to harvest buffalo at almost any time of the year depended on the horse, supplied by the Spanish colonies. While this contribution came late in the seventeenth century, it had not spread to all the Plains tribes until a century later. But the horse alone would have been of little immediate use to the Indians; they also had to borrow its gear, trappings, and methods of management from Europeans. The whole economic structure of the Plains tribes was further strengthened by other items from the European traderssteel knives, needles, cloth, and guns.
Several cultural elements common to the many diverse peoples throughout the plains were supplied by tribes from the woodland fringe, who in turn may have learned them from others in the Ohio Valley. Most spectacular of these, and with the widest distribution, were the grand ceremonies with religious overtones that white men combined under the title sun dance. Another common practice was the elaborate war game with its complicated rules and scoring system.
Important political ideas also came from the woodland tribes, the most important being the pattern for the dog soldiers, or camp police, so necessary when nomads from several bands assembled in a large group for ceremonies or for hunting.
At the opening of the nineteenth century most of the woodland fringe from Canada to central Arkansas was held by the several tribes of the Siouan family, with a total population of about 63,000 people. Of these, 27,000 were true nomads by this time, living on the open plains throughout the year. These included the Teton and Hunkpapa Sioux, Crow, and Assiniboin, who ranged throughout Dakota and eastern Montana, and spilled over into Wyoming to the south and Manitoba to the north.
In addition to the Siouan seminomads of the woodland fringe, several other tribes of seminomads held most of the Missouri Valley for hundreds of miles, living in large villages with permanent lodges and growing large fields of corn. These were the Hidatsa, Mandan, Iowa, Oto, and Omaha. When the sun-dance ceremony was brought to the plains by the Sioux, it soon spread to all these related people, then to tribes to the west, north, and south. The Blackfeet had it quite early, while it did not reach the Comanches, the last of the nomadic tribes to adopt it, until about 1875.