The Plains Nations: Beliefs and Way of Life

A Patchwork of Nations, Not a Single People

By the early nineteenth century the Great Plains stretched from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, a vast grassland the size of western Europe. It was already home to hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of distinct nations — the Lakota Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Comanche, the Crow and the Pawnee, alongside many others. Each had its own language, leadership and territory. The Crow, for example, were long-standing rivals of the Lakota and would later scout for the US Army against them. To lump them together as one undifferentiated people is to miss the politics of the Plains entirely.

The Edexcel specification reflects this by using the term Indigenous peoples. The change matters: it signals that these were sovereign nations, not a passive backdrop to settlement. Naming a specific nation — Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche — whenever the spec lets you, will sharpen any answer you write for the rest of this unit.

Bands, Tribes and Chiefs

Within each nation, people lived in bands — small groups of perhaps 50 to 500 related families who travelled and hunted together. Several bands made up a tribe, and several tribes a nation. Leadership did not work as it did in Europe. There was no all-powerful king. Instead, chiefs were chosen for their wisdom, bravery or generosity, and their authority rested on persuasion. A chief who lost the trust of his people simply lost his following.

Big decisions — whether to move camp, to make peace, to go to war — were debated by a council of elders and warrior-society leaders. Warrior societies, such as the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, kept order on the hunt and led war parties. This decentralised system was a real strength on the Plains, but it would later confuse US negotiators, who often signed treaties with one chief and assumed the whole nation was bound.

The Horse and the Buffalo

Plains life rested on two animals. The horse, brought to the Americas by Spanish colonists and spread to the Plains in the 1700s, transformed everything. A nation that had once walked could now ride hundreds of miles a year, follow vast buffalo herds and outrun rivals. By 1835 horse wealth was the measure of a Plains family’s standing — the Comanche, in particular, ran herds in the tens of thousands.

The other animal was the buffalo, or bison — an estimated 30 million on the Plains in 1835. The Lakota, Cheyenne and others were nomadic hunters who followed the herds with the seasons. They lived in the tipi, a portable home of hides over poles that could be struck and re-pitched in under an hour. Almost every part of the buffalo was used: meat for food, hide for tipi covers and clothing, sinew for bowstrings, bone for tools, hooves boiled for glue, the bladder turned into a water-skin. Lose the buffalo, and the whole way of life unravels — a fact the US Army would exploit ruthlessly later in the period.

Beliefs about Land, Spirit and Nature

Plains spiritual life centred on a belief that the natural world was alive with sacred power. The Lakota called the creator Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. Mother Earth was honoured as a giver of life. Sacred sites — above all the Black Hills of modern-day South Dakota — were places where the spirit world was felt most strongly. Young men marked the passage to adulthood with a vision quest: alone, fasting, awaiting a vision that would guide their adult life. Medicine men acted as healers and as bridges between the living and the spirit world.

Crucially, the land itself was not seen as something to be owned. It was used in common — a hunting territory belonged to the nation as a whole, not to a private family. There were no fences, no deeds, no surveyors. This belief sat directly across from the American settler idea that land was a 160-acre rectangle to be claimed, fenced and inherited. The clash was structural, not just political: two systems of property could not occupy the same ground.

War, Counting Coup and the Misreading of Plains Conflict

Inter-tribal war on the Plains had a logic of its own. Raids for horses and revenge between, for example, the Lakota and the Crow were frequent and dangerous, but they were not aimed at total destruction. Honour was won by daring, not by body counts. The highest deed for a Lakota or Cheyenne warrior was counting coup — touching an enemy in battle and getting away alive, without needing to kill. White observers, expecting European-style warfare, often misread these raids as savage anarchy.