The Plains Indians' Way of Life
A Continent of Different Peoples
Students often write about ‘the Plains Indians’ or even ‘the Sioux’ as if every Native person between the Mississippi and the Rockies belonged to a single people. The reality is much richer. The Plains were home to dozens of nations, each with its own language, leadership and territory: the Lakota Sioux in the northern Plains, the Cheyenne and Arapaho on the central Plains, the Comanche on the southern Plains, the Crow in the Yellowstone country, the Pawnee on the Platte River. They sometimes allied with one another — and they sometimes fought one another fiercely. The Crow scouted FOR the US Army against the Lakota at Little Bighorn. Treating these nations as a single bloc misses how the unit’s wars actually unfolded.
The Plains were not a single ‘Indian’ world. Major nations included the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Crow and Pawnee. Each had its own language, territory and leadership, and the relationships between them were often hostile, not united.
The Horse and the Buffalo
Two animals shaped almost everything else. The Spanish had brought horses to the Americas in the 1500s; by 1750 horses had spread across the Plains, and Native peoples who had once hunted on foot became some of the finest horse-mounted hunters and warriors in the world. The Comanche in particular built an empire of horse breeders and raiders that the historian Pekka Hämäläinen has described as the dominant power of the southern Plains. The second animal was the bison — the buffalo. An estimated 30–60 million buffalo roamed the Plains in 1840. Plains nations followed the herds, hunting them on horseback with bow and lance, and using almost every part of the carcass: meat for food, hide for clothes and tipi covers, sinew for thread, bones for tools, dung for fuel.
Because the buffalo moved with the seasons, settlement followed. The Plains nations lived in tipis — conical tents of buffalo hide on long poles. A skilled woman could take down a tipi in fifteen minutes and remount it on a horse-drawn travois. This portability was the secret of nomadic life: people did not move because they were unsettled; they moved because the buffalo did.
Bands, Tribes and Nations
Plains society was built in layers. A family belonged to a band — a group of perhaps 100 people who travelled together and hunted together. Several bands made up a tribe, sharing a language and customs. Several related tribes formed a nation, such as the Lakota or the Cheyenne. Decisions were made by councils of elders, not by a single all-powerful king. Chiefs were chosen for wisdom, generosity and bravery rather than birth, and they could be replaced. Below the chiefs were warrior societies, which policed the camp, organised hunts and led raids. White officials in Washington often did not understand this structure: they would press a single chief to sign a treaty and assume his signature bound every band, when no chief could speak for any band but his own.
Most Plains nations recognised a single spiritual presence behind nature, often translated in English as the Great Spirit or, in Lakota, Wakan Tanka. Earth was a living mother. Land was not owned but shared. Some places — such as the Black Hills of Dakota for the Lakota — were sacred and could never be sold. A young man would seek personal direction through a vision quest: alone on a hilltop, fasting for several days, he hoped for a vision that would guide his life and identify a personal animal protector. These beliefs would clash directly with US ideas of land as private property.
Warfare on the Plains
Plains warfare looked very different from European warfare and was often misread by white observers. Raids were small, fast and aimed at horses, captives or revenge rather than territory. Honour came not from killing but from counting coup — touching an enemy in battle without killing him — or from rescuing a fallen friend. A successful raid might kill nobody but bring home thirty horses and a story to tell. White officers often dismissed this as cowardice; in fact it was a different concept of bravery, one in which proximity to the enemy mattered more than body count.
Inter-tribal conflict was real and serious. The Lakota expanded into the Black Hills in the 1770s by pushing out the Cheyenne and Crow; the Comanche fought rivals across the southern Plains. By 1840, however, smallpox — carried up the Missouri in 1837 by an American Fur Company steamboat — had killed about nine in ten Mandan and around half the Arikara. The Plains world the early settlers met was one already changed by European arrival.
Three contrasts stand out. First, land: Plains nations saw the earth as a shared mother; the United States ran on private title deeds. Second, government: Plains decisions were made by councils with limited authority; Washington negotiated as if a single chief could sign for all his people. Third, progress: 19th-century American culture treated farming, towns and ploughs as the definition of civilisation. Buffalo-hunting nomadism, no matter how successful, looked to settlers like a stage to be moved past. None of these gaps was easily bridged, and each helps explain why peace policies broke down so often.
The buffalo was the foundation of Plains life. Hide became tipi covers and clothing; meat became food (eaten fresh or dried as pemmican); sinew was used as thread; bones became tools and weapons; dung was burned as fuel where wood was scarce. To destroy the buffalo, as the US Army would later set out to do, was to destroy the way of life.