Home : Opening Of The West :Who Were The Western Indians?Western history has been written by the white man, mainly in celebration of himself, but the Indians have refused to fade into the landscape as so much vegetation or a part of the wild life. Had the Indians not dwelt there, white men might not have established themselves in the West yet: no Coronado, no Verendrye, no Lewis and Clark, no Jedediah Smith, none to answer the great roll call all the way down through time. When white men entered the West to stay, for a long time they maintained themselves there only by becoming Indians of a sort themselves. But who then were the western Indians? Our ideas about them are colored by the sunset light in which the tribes were viewed through most of the last century. Go back three hundred years and you may search the West in vain for many of the tribes that seem most characteristically western. They hadn't got there yet, or they had not acquired the traits that set them apart from other Indians. Rare are the exceptions, like the village dwellers of the sun-drenched Southwest, with a culture so tightly knit and so rooted in the earth as to have held at bay all finally destructive change. Where the American Indians came from has been a topic of speculation since Columbus returned from the Indies in 1493- Indian accounts of their origin are fascinating without being wholly informative. Lewis and Clark were told in 1804 that all the Mandan had once resided in a single large village underground, near a subterranean lake. A grapevine having extended its roots down to their home and admitted the golden light, a few of the Mandan climbed up the vine to discover the earth, black with buffalo and rich with fruit. Seduced by the taste of the grapes, the Mandan resolved to abandon their dull residence for the region above. Men, women and children began ascending the vine, but when half the nation had reached the surface, the vine broke under the weight of a fat woman, condemning the rest of the people to remain in their sunless home below. The Mandan believed that when they died they would return to the subterranean home of their forefathers. Another, and now more general, view respecting the origin of the Indians is that over a period of not less than 20,000 years - perhaps twice as long as that - various migrations found their way from Asia across the intermittent Bering land bridge, each migration mov ing imperceptibly down through the corridors of the Rocky and Andean mountains to spread out into the vast reaches of the Americas. Ethnologists classify the various modern Indian tribes which descended from these inconceivably ancient migrations according to the language they speak. Culturally, linguistic cousins may differ widely, and live on terms no more cordial than do members of ordinary families; the language may also have undergone vast change, so that an Osage finds an Assiniboin no more comprehensible than a Portuguese finds a Romanian. But so stubborn is the substructure of language that careful study of it can establish ancient kinships and vaguely make out the lineaments of an unwritten history beyond the ken of even the mistiest tradition. The Indians north of Mexico have been divided into the following main linguistic stocks: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, Muskhogean, Caddoan, Shoshonean, Athapascan, Salishan and other small groups in high mountains of the Northwest, and Yuman and Piman in the deserts of the extreme Southwest. A clutter of smaller groups lived down the Northwest Coast and in California, around the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Rio Grande. In general the Algonquians occupied the forested country from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, with vast islands of Iroquoian peoples around the lower Great Lakes and down the Appalachians. The Siouan peoples, apart from a detached branch in Virginia and the Carolinas, lived primarily in the western reaches of the Mississippi Valley above the mouth of the Arkansas. As late as 1800, most of the Siouans still resided east of the Missouri River, and none very far from it. The Muskhogean peoples of the southeastern United States became associated with the West only after Indian removal began in 1831, when such so-called civilized tribes as the Creeks and Choctaw despairingly followed the "trail of tears" to new homes in what became Oklahoma. West of the original homeland of the Muskhogeans, the Caddoans occupied much of Louisiana, eastern Texas and southwestern Arkansas, with a few, like the Pawnee and Arikara, living along the edge of the Plains farther north. West of these families dwelt the Shoshonean peoples, who took for their home the central Rockies and the high desert plateaus beyond. The Athapascans, probably the last great linguistic stock to enter North America, though no one is certain of the time, were divided into two main groups. The Northern Athapascans, before i800 as since, made their homes in Alaska and northwestern Canada; there were also many small enclaves of them down the Northwest Coast as far as California. The Southern Athapascans once occupied most of the Great Plains, as well as much of the Southwest, but in the period of recorded history became concentrated mainly in New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico, where they were called Apache and Navajo. The Old Oregon country, embracing Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and parts of Idaho and Montana, was principally occupied by Salishan and other small groups of people, while in western Arizona, southeastern California and northwestern Mexico the Yuman and Piman peoples held sway. These various groups seem mere abstractions until they are broken down into specific tribes, using the names by which we chiefly know the Indians of the American West. In most instances, these names have never been used by the tribes among themselves. In their own languages, the Navajo are the Dine, the People; the Arapaho are the Inutiaina, the People; the Mandan are the Numakiki, the People. Most tribes have always thought of themselves as the People, the Folks, Us. Coming from outside, whites usually learned of a new people through a neighboring tribe and fixed an alien name upon that people before encountering them. The name Sioux, for example, is an abbreviation of Nadowessioux, a French corruption of a name applied to an enemy tribe by the Ojibway and signifying (not cordially) snake or adder. Still, the names fixed upon the tribes, whether native or alien, have served their purpose, for names are simply convenient handles for things. The Blackfeet, or Siksika, along with two subtribes called Piegan and Bloods, speak an archaic form, of Algonquian and presumably are the oldest members of their family in the West, having come out of the eastern woodlands many generations before any of their kinsmen. They have preserved a tribal memory of a remote time when they lived in the Red River country, from which they advanced into the Canadian and American West, driving other Indians before them. They were followed out of the woodlands by another Algonquian people, who became the Plains Cree; and farther to the south, yet other Algonquians advanced to and beyond the Missouri, becoming known as Cheyenne and Arapaho. An offshoot of the latter, the Gros Ventres of the Prairies, eventually took up residence among the Blackfeet. The Siouans would be notable if only because an extraordinary number of states have taken their names from particular tribes. Arkansas, the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri all bear Siouan names. Some branches of this family early established homes on or near the Missouri, including the Mandan, Ponca, Omaha, Oto, Iowa, Missouri, Kansa and Osage — farming peoples who at the eastern margin of the Plains also did some hunting. Though not the less western for that, they are better thought of as river-and-prairie than as Plains Indians. The earliest of the Siouan peoples to migrate out into the Plains, north of the Missouri, may have been the Assiniboin, recorded as a separate tribe as early as 1604. From a homeland in the lake and canoe country around the heads of the Mississippi, they drifted west and north, reaching Lake Winnipeg by r6go. They then moved on to the Plains of Canada and the upper Missouri. It is possible that they were preceded into the farther West by that Siouan tribe now termed the Crows. The Crows, or Absaroka, came originally to the banks of the Missouri as one people with the Gros Ventres of the Missouri (not to be confused with the Gros Ventres of the Prairies). These Gros Ventres, also known as Hidatsa or Minnetaree, settled in permanent villages near their remote cousins, the Mandan. For some reason the Crows split off and moved on into the valley of the Yellowstone, which they made into a famous homeland, tenaciously defended, first against the Blackfeet, later against the main body of Sioux. The separation from the Hidatsa may have occurred before 1700, but the Crows preserved a sense of kinship, and over the next century and a half made periodic pilgrimages back to the Missouri to visit and trade with their only near relatives. Much later came the peoples we know collectively as the Sioux. Most of the Sioux proper, who called themselves Dakota (allies), were driven out of Minnesota at the end of a centuries-long conflict with the Ojibway (Chippewa); some were forced out of Iowa by the Sauk and Foxes. (These peoples had been pushed west by yet more easterly tribes, and this continual pressure and displacement was a fact of life for all the Plains tribes through most of the nineteenth century; an Indian homeland was one of the most unstable entities imaginable.) The Sioux were moving up to and crossing the Missouri, their culture and character changing all the while, throughout the half-century after the Declaration of Independence. They consisted of three principal subtribes, the Santee, Yankton and Teton. The last-named, comprising more than half of all the Sioux, made the adaptation to Plains life which, together with their numbers, predestined them as the ultimate defenders of an Indian way of life on the Plains against the unappeasable whites. Prey of the Siouan peoples through most of recorded history were those Caddoan cousins, the Pawnee and Arikara. The latter settled on the Missouri near its Great Bend (but under Siouan attack later moved up closer to the Mandan), while the Pawnee established their home villages on the Platte and its branches. In striking contrast to the foregoing tribes, the Kiowa did not enter the Plains from the east. They were long an ethnological mystery, their language thought to be unrelated to any other. Patient analysis has finally shown that Kiowan is related to one of the two principal tongues spoken by the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande Valley. Either the Kiowa are one of the very oldest of Plains peoples, having remained there after their kinsmen settled on the Rio Grande as farmers, or at some remote time the village people who became the Kiowa separated from their sedentary kinsmen, moved out into the Plains and became so attached to that expanse of earth and sky as to lose all memory of any other home. During the nineteenth century they migrated from the northern to the southern Plains and brought with them the conviction that their original homeland was the upper Yellowstone and the Missouri. The Kiowa were so closely affiliated with one Apache group as to be called Kiowa Apache; they were the last of the Athapascan peoples who had ruled most of the Great Plains for several hundred years. Coronado's army on its great entrada of 1540-41 marched out into the Plains to encounter Indians who were surely Apache, and in describing them one of the Spanish chroniclers gave a memorable picture of the buffalo-hunting Plains Indian as he was during the age-long time before he acquired the horse. These Indians live or sustain themselves entirely from the cattle, for they neither grow nor harvest maize. With the skins they build their houses; with the skins they clothe and shoe themselves; from the skins they make ropes and also obtain wool. With the sinews they make thread, with which they sew their clothes and also their tents. From the bones they shape awls. The dung they use for firewood, since there is no other fuel in that land. The bladders they use as jugs and drinking containers. They sustain themselves on their meat, eating it slightly roasted and heated over the dung. Some they eat raw; taking it in their teeth, they pull with one hand, and in the other they hold a large flint knife and cut off mouthfuls. Thus they swallow it, half chewed, like birds. They eat raw fat without warming it. They drink the blood just as it comes out of the cattle. Sometimes they drink it later, raw and cold. They have no other food. These people have dogs similar to those of this land [Mexico], except that they are somewhat larger. They load these dogs like beasts of burden and make light pack-saddles for them like our pack-saddles, cinching them with leather straps. The dogs go about with sores on their backs like pack animals. When the Indians go hunting they load them with provisions. When these Indians move - for they have no permanent residence anywhere, since they follow the cattle to find food - these dogs carry their homes for them. In addition to what they carry on their backs, they carry the poles for the tents, dragging them fastened to their saddles. The load may be from thirty-five to fifty pounds, depending on the dog. Besides the Apache associated with the Kiowa, others, including the Lipan, Jicarilla, Mescalero and Chiricahua, ranged through western Texas and New Mexico, southern Arizona and northern Mexico, proving themselves in a harsh desert environment one of the toughest, most resistant peoples who ever lived. North of these Apache, in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona, dwelt their remarkable cousins, the Navajo, who found ways to wring a living from a country little richer than so much blue sky. On the basis of recent tree-ring evidence, the Navajo were already in their present homeland in Coronado's day; in all likelihood, they had settled there many Centuries before the first Spaniards arrived. North of the Navajo dwelt the numerous Shoshonean peoples - "tribes" is for most of them too cohesive a term - who made the Rocky Mountains and the intermontane basins to the west yield them a reluctant living. Many existed in so barren an environment as to be reduced to eating anything and everything that ran or hopped or crawled upon the ground. They also gathered seeds and dug for edible roots - hence the term "Diggers" applied later by contemptuous whites (who were sometimes more than glad to partake of the same fare, not excepting grasshoppers and crickets). A detached branch of this Shoshonean linguistic stock were the patient, peaceful, incredibly enduring Hopi, who are known to have lived in the vicinity of their present mesas in northern Arizona for seven hundred years or more. They resembled the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande and Gila valleys in everything but language. Some small groups of the Shoshonean family lived in southern California. The Chemehuevi made their homes on the lower Colorado River, the Southern Paiute on both sides of that river and well up into Nevada and Utah. These two peoples, with the Hopi and a few Ute, were the only Shoshonean growers of maize, beans and pumpkins. North of the Southern Paiute, in the western and northern reaches of the Great Basin, lived a diversity of peoples: the Ute, Northern Paiute, Bannock, Western Shoshoni and Eastern Shoshoni, with the Comanche an offshoot of the latter. The dark mountain-people called Ute ranged between northern New Mexico and the Great Salt Lake. Familiar to the Spaniards in New Mexico early in the seventeenth century, they were renowned from the beginning for their valor. It was the Ute who first brought the Comanche to the New Mexican settlements, soon after 1700. The Comanche were just then cutting loose from their old homes in southern Wyoming. Having acquired horses, their life and character were being revolutionized. In the far Northwest were those Salishan tribes who have their own distinctive place in the history of the West, including such inland peoples as the Flatheads (whose heads were no flatter than yours or mine) and their close cousins. These interior tribes made the most of the salmon runs, but after the coming of the horse they hunted extensively, often crossing the Continental Divide in present Montana seeking buffalo. Much like the Flatheads were the Nez Perces and Kutenai. All three were of different linguistic stock, but in a similar environment developed similar cultures. They were further united by a common enmity toward the Blackfeet, who held sway on the buffalo ranges. These three tribes are among the most remarkable of all Indian groups, morally superior to most of the early whites who entered their country. Their conquest has given to western history a peculiarly somber note. Too diverse for comment are the many peoples living intermixed down through Oregon and California, though some, like the Modoc, have their own place in the history of the West. California, islanded in time almost since time itself began, presents a singular contrast to the unceasing cultural ebb and flow of Indian life elsewhere on the continent; until the white man arrived, nothing ever seemed to happen in California, societies remaining stable from one millennium to the next. On the lower Colorado and in the country adjacent lived peoples of the ancient Piman stock, like the Pima and Papago, who have tilled the soil under the blazing Arizona sun for nine thousand years or more. Their immediate neighbors were also farmers, tall red men of Yuman stock, including the Maricopa, Yuma, Cocopa, Mohave, Walapai, Yavapai and - highest up the Colorado, dwelling in the depths of the Grand Canyon - the Havasupai. Immense as the American West is, few of its tribes lived in a stage of savage innocence when Lewis and Clark set out up the Missouri in the spring of 1804. Many of the tribes had been in contact with whites for two and a half centuries, their life already greatly changed by the fact that white men existed on the same continent. Europeans sailed to the widely separated ocean shores of America with various trade goods (above all, iron and the gun), while at the same time they journeyed up out of Mexico bringing grains, fruit trees, sheep, cattle, asses and horses. Over immemorially ancient intertribal trade routes, along which for thousands of years had passed such things as sea shells and copper, the astonishing new goods brought by the white men were carried into the interior, stimulating a return flow of beaver and otter pelts, deerskins, elk and buffalo hides-and slaves, usually redskinned, occasionally white. Some tribes became prime suppliers, others carriers. New forms and accumulations of wealth made warfare more worthwhile, and trade itself became a fighting matter. Particularly in the case of guns and ammunition, it was important to be able to control the trade and to cut it off altogether when self-interest required. Lewis and Clark found that this was exactly the position of the Teton Sioux in 1804; they themselves meant to conduct any trade with their enemies, not neglecting their middleman's profit. The gun and the horse were the two prime factors that shaped the history of the West after the coming of the white man. Outside the West itself, the gun counted most, enabling more easterly tribes to overpower their neighbors and hustle them along toward the sunset, even as they themselves were being pushed westward by the whites. In the West the horse had a yet more revolutionary impact. Although the horse had flourished in North America during past geological time, it died out along with the mammoth and the giant sloth. When Cortez and his conquistadors brought the horse back to the New World, the Indians of Mexico beheld it as a god, and the horse inspired much the same awe throughout the first era of the Spanish advance into the interior of the continent. But mastery of the horse has always enlarged men's ideas of themselves; they, not the horse, become the true god. In the presence of the horse, Indians quickly grew in stature. Between the time of Coronado's entrada and Onate's colonization of New Mexico at the end of the sixteenth century, Indians on the advancing Spanish frontier began to steal from the ranchos or capture mounts from the multiplying wild herds. Indians in southern Texas may have begun to master the use of the horse before Onate reached the Rio Grande, but the real impact of the horse upon the American West followed the establishment of a Spanish crown colony in New Mexico. When, about 1693, the first Frenchmen ventured up the Missouri, one piece of news brought back was that the Pawnee were trading for horses in the Spanish Southwest. By the close of the century, the horse had spread up through the Rockies as far as the basin of the Columbia. By 1730 the Snakes (or Shoshoni) were using the horse in warfare against the Blackfeet on the Saskatchewan plains; coincidentally, at just this time the Blackfeet had acquired their first guns and iron points for their arrows. The Big Dogs (a name given horses by most Plains Indians) were as terrifying to the Blackfeet as the death-dealing guns were to the Snakes, but the Blackfeet were quick to learn. They could keep the Snakes from getting guns, and they were able to steal horses. Soon the Snake lands were infested with Blackfoot horsethieves, and by 1754 the Blackfeet had become superb horsemen, evolving a nomadic Plains culture of tepees, war bonnets, baskets, skin receptacles instead of breakable pottery, and all the accouterments that went with a life dependent on chasing buffalo. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the Rockies, the Blackfeet had fastened their grip on the country as far south as the Missouri. One tribe utterly transformed by the acquisition of the horse, rendered into something new and terrible, were the Comanche. As early as 1706 they had begun to harry the Apache from the Plains, and they soon extended their raids to the Spanish settlements. By 1739 the Comanche were masters of the central and southern Plains, and fell heir to the French gun trade based on the Missouri and Red rivers. The Comanche kept the Spanish settlements bleeding all through the 1740's, and despite peaceful interludes were a fearful fact of life on the frontier until Spanish dominion in North America ended in 1821. Fugitive glimpses of the coming of the horse to the Blackfeet and the Comanche give us an insight into the revolutionary change that worked upon Indian life in the West throughout the eighteenth century. The impact and meaning of the change can again be seen in the case of the Cheyenne. These valiant Algonquians once lived in Minnesota, but were pushed westward by enemy tribes. Reaching the Missouri about 1678, they became farmers like the Arikara, but unlike their neighbors, when goaded by the ever-advancing Sioux, the Cheyenne became nomadic too. Feasting on the limitless buffalo herds they wandered as far south as the Spanish settlements. Trading peltries at Santa Fe and San Antonio for horses, they would steal a few for good measure before riding north. The Cheyenne retained a hankering for the corn of their agricultural days, and each summer at harvest time they appeared over the skyline southwest of the Arikara villages eager to trade horses for the ripe grain. In the 1830's, influenced by the establishment of Bent's Fort on the Arkansas (near the present La Junta), the Cheyenne made the southern Plains their permanent home. But their earlier seasonal movements to the last settled place they had ever called home proved to be of incalculable importance to white traders attempting to establish themselves in the West after 1800. The Cheyenne, as the main source of horseflesh, gave the Arikara villages strategic importance in the evolution of Western history. It was at the Arikara villages in the summer of 1811 that John Jacob Astor's associate in the fur business, Wilson Price Hunt, abandoned his intention of following Lewis and Clark's water route across the continent and traded for horses to take a more southerly course, the first land crossing of the American West. William H. Ashley and many another fur trader similarly supplied themselves at the Arikara villages in later years. Not all western Indians became horse Indians. In many parts of the West, the country was too poor to support a horse culture, and the best use to which the Indians could put a horse was to eat him. (The taste was one easily acquired, and in California a whole class of Indians became known as Horse-Eaters.) The settled Indians of the Southwest did not take enthusiastically to the horse, burros being better suited to their needs; and much of the Pacific littoral simply wasn't horse country. In the Southwest the Spanish colonists, superimposing their own culture upon that of the Pueblo Indians, were transformed into a kind of Pueblo Indian themselves, though addicted to the horse and the raising of livestock— an addiction enthusiastically acquired by the Navajo. Still and all, it was the horse Indian who became the primary barrier to any further white advance, and in the end he became the mentor of the white man who must adapt himself to life in the West.
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