edunorth.files.wordpress.com · Web view“It was on this trip up the Muddy I discovered the...
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1 Trade Among Tribes: Commerce on the Plains before Europeans Arrived Samuel Western Published: April 26, 2016 https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/trade-among-tribes-commerce-plains- europeans-arrived Trade links among northern Plains tribes about 1775, before the arrival of Europeans. Courtesy W. Raymond Wood. In the spring of 1934, an aging cowboy and stockman wrote some recollections to the editor of the Lusk Free Lance, a newspaper then published in Niobrara County in eastern Wyoming. In his letter, Addison A. Spaugh detailed his extensive life in the Wyoming cattle business, including a discovery he made in 1880 while driving cattle up the Muddy River drainage in the foothills of the Laramie Range. “It was on this trip up the Muddy I discovered the Spanish Diggings. Thinking I had discovered a Spanish gold mine, I reported the fact to Mr. Manville [Hiram S. Manville, co-owner of the Converse Cattle Company] and he reported it to Adams and Glover, two drug store men in Cheyenne …” The name, Spanish Diggings, stuck. Assumptions about its origins did not. Archeologists and geologists were the first to call Spaugh’s assumptions into question. In 1894, University of Wyoming Geology Professor Wilbur C. Knight examined the quarries and estimated that “aborigines” excavated “hundreds of thousands if not millions of tons,” of quartzite. Knight made no reference to the Spanish or any other European settlers.
edunorth.files.wordpress.com · Web view“It was on this trip up the Muddy I discovered the Spanish Diggings. Thinking I had discovered a Spanish gold mine, I reported the fact to
Samuel Western Published: April 26, 2016
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/trade-among-tribes-commerce-plains-europeans-arrived
In the spring of 1934, an aging cowboy and stockman wrote some
recollections to the editor of the Lusk Free Lance, a newspaper
then published in Niobrara County in eastern Wyoming . In his
letter, Addison A. Spaugh detailed his extensive life in the
Wyoming cattle business , including a discovery he made in
1880 while driving cattle up the Muddy River drainage in the
foothills of the Laramie Range.
“It was on this trip up the Muddy I discovered the Spanish
Diggings. Thinking I had discovered a Spanish gold mine, I reported
the fact to Mr. Manville [Hiram S. Manville, co-owner of the
Converse Cattle Company] and he reported it to Adams and Glover,
two drug store men in Cheyenne …”
The name, Spanish Diggings, stuck. Assumptions about its origins
did not. Archeologists and geologists were the first to call
Spaugh’s assumptions into question. In 1894, University of Wyoming
Geology Professor Wilbur C. Knight examined the quarries and
estimated that “aborigines” excavated “hundreds of thousands if not
millions of tons,” of quartzite.
Knight made no reference to the Spanish or any other European
settlers.
Eventually, archeologists would confirm that Spanish Diggings is a
400 square-mile series of Paleo-Indian quarries, dating to 10,000
years ago. As Gene Gade, president of the Vore Buffalo
Jump Foundation, notes, “It was slowly accepted that the
‘Spanish Diggings’ were, in fact, the work of groups of hunters
that had lived in the region and quarried the stone for projectile
points, knives, scrapers, and other tools.”
Trade among tribes of the Plains
A general misperception of Native American enterprise and trade
continues today. On the Wikipedia page on Indian Trade, the
discussion centers on Native American interactions with the English
at the Jamestown colony in Virginia, general information about
tribes involved in the Canadian-Missouri fur trade , and
explains how some California tribes gathered slaves for the
Spanish. The page omits any references to or examples of
tribe-to-tribe trade.
Indians of the southern and northern Plains traded with each other
for thousands of years. Flint points 13,000 years old, chiseled
from the Texas quarries, have been found in eastern New Mexico.
Quarried stone from the Obsidian Cliffs near Mammoth Hot Springs,
Wyo. in Yellowstone Park, traveled to the the Ohio
River Valley around 100-350 CE.
While archeological objects abound in Wyoming, the artifacts alone
don’t tell the story of pre-settlement trade among nomadic Plains
tribes. Moreover, even before the advent of Europeans, tribal
boundaries fluctuated with weather, game populations and alliances
with other tribes. For example, the Comanche, one of the most
entrepreneurial of tribes, once were part of the Shoshone tribe and
lived largely in what's now Wyoming. In the middle 18th
century they split from the Shoshone and moved south to rule the
plains of Texas and Oklahoma.
Archeological artifacts do suggest, however, that native-to-native
trade expanded over time. Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie
Porterfield, authors of the Encyclopedia of American Indian
Contributions to the World, say that the Hohokam tribe, centered in
present day Arizona, traded seashells, which they had acquired from
the Mojave tribe, for buffalo hides from various southern Plains
tribes. “By between 500 and 200 B.C., North American Indians had
established a vital network of trade.”
Those networks weren’t equally distributed, however, on the central
plains.
Wyoming’s role in tribal networks
The center of Wyoming, close to modern-day Lander, is isolated and
roughly 800 miles equidistant from the three major pre-settlement
trading centers for tribes: The Dalles, where the Chinookan tribes
gathered along the Columbia River in what’s now Oregon; Taos Pueblo
in present New Mexico, which serviced the tribes of the southwest;
and the Mandan/Hidatsa trade center, where the Knife River joins
the Missouri River in modern-day North Dakota, where northern
Plains tribes came to trade (see map).
There were also trade centers further south along the Missouri in
what’s now South Dakota– the Arikara Center and the Dakota
Rendezvous – that attracted mostly tribes from the southern
Plains.
It would be reasonable to assume that entrepreneurial tribes
inhabiting Wyoming faced the same obstacles as a modern Wyoming
business in creating a trade hub: distance to markets, lack of a
critical mass of customers, and inclement weather. That may be
true.
Wyoming, however, was home to at least two enterprising tribes, the
Crow, and particularly the Shoshone, who had their own trade fair,
the Shoshone Rendezvous.
We know little about this event, including its exact location. The
recognized authority on the Shoshone Rendezvous, Smithsonian
ethnologist John C. Ewers, wrote in the early 1950s that the most
likely location was in “in the river valleys of southwestern
Wyoming west of the South Pass —“a description that would
also fit the later, better-known fur trade rendezvous of
1825-1840.
Ewers’s main source is Canadian fur trader M. Charles McKenzie’s
narrative, “The Mississouri [sic] Indians. A narrative of four
trading expeditions to the Mississouri, 1804, 1805, 1806, for the
North-West Company.”
Tribes, aiming for handsome profit, would buy items from the either
the Mandan/Hidatsa Center or the Dakota Rendezvous and transport
them to southwest Wyoming each spring.
Relying on McKenzie, Ewers notes that in June 1805, the Crow traded
250 horses to the Hidatsa, who offered 200 guns in exchange. The
next year the Hidatsa offered 200 guns to the Cheyenne, hoping to
receive at least that many horses in exchange. Normal markups were
100 percent; the Crow sold horses to the Mandan and Hidatsa at
twice the price they had paid at the Shoshone rendezvous. The river
tribes doubled the prices again when trading with others, like
themselves, on the upper Missouri.
W. Raymond Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology at the
University of Missouri,said that long before the advent of
Europeans the Shoshone Rendezvous served as a trade link between
tribes of the Pacific Coast and tribes of the upper Missouri.
“Crow Indians,” writes Wood, “carried goods to this rendezvous from
the northern plains; Utes brought goods to it from the Southwest;
and the Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Flatheads brought goods from the
Great Basin and Plateau.”
The Shoshone Rendezvous eventually gave way to the Green
River Rendezvous, generally credited as an invention of Rocky
Mountain Fur Company co-founder, William Ashley.
Although there is no direct connection between the two, Ewers says
its “probable” that Ashley’s rendezvous “was an adaption of the
pre-existing Shoshoni trading rendezvous, at the same season of the
year and the same region, in the advantage of white
trappers.”
“We think that the Shoshone were among the great Indian traders in
the interior West,” said Dudley Gardner, professor emeritus of
history and political science at Western Wyoming Community College
in Rock Springs . “ Jim Bridger 's trading post location”—on
the Black’s Fork of the Green River in what’s now Uinta
County, Wyo.—“in the Dove Eater Band of the Shoshoni was no
accident.”
From John C. Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian
Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1955), Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin #159, p. 11
Anthropologist John C. Ewers mapped the movement of horse
acquisition from South to North, and tribe to tribe, over the
Plains and along the Rocky Mountains. Most of the 1700s passed
before horses reached the peoples of the Columbia Gorge.
One of the reasons Clark had so much difficulty in purchasing
horses at The Dalles in the spring of 1806 is that he was at the
very northwestern edge of their dispersal across North America.
During the expedition's first and second years, it had traveled
among Plains Indian nations where horses were plentiful and had
occasioned a cultural revolution. In leaving the Columbia Gorge
late in 1806, however, the expedition had left horse country
behind. When Clark tried to obtain horses in the Gorge the next
year, he was seeking a commodity that was still relatively rare
locally.
The small "dawn horse," Hyracotherium, had gone extinct
in North America1 after flourishing around 58 to 52 million
years before present. Spanish explorers brought horses back to
North America beginning in the 16th century, but they watched and
protected their animals as closely as Lewis and Clark's men did
their guns, knives, and tomahawks. Not until horse herds were
established in Spanish settlements of Mexico and the future
southwestern United States did the animals begin to disperse across
North America again. They were traded and raided away from Spanish
towns and ranches, and further traded and raided, gradually, from
tribe to tribe. Initial-contact accounts from white explorers and
traders provide information on which tribes owned horses—and which
still did not—when whites first visited them. Horses' dispersal
north on the Great Plains, west of the Rocky Mountains, and east
toward the Mississippi, can be dated, in part, from those accounts.
Oral traditions from tribes who received horses later add further
dating information.
The route for horses to Indians of The Dalles was from the Santa Fe
area through the Utes and Comanches of Utah (beginning in 1705), to
the Comanches' relatives, the Shoshonis of Wyoming (roughly the
1710s to 1720s), to the Nez Perce (around 1730) who
recalled the Shoshonis as their source. Living in a land blessed
with grasses and remote from raiders from other nations, the Nez
Perces developed horse herds and practiced controlled breeding.
With animals to spare in trade, they began to take horses to The
Dalles' trading mart late in the 18th century, initiating the
horse's distribution onto the Columbia Plateau.
The Nez Perces and their neighbors the Palouse Indians also
developed the Appaloosa breed, distinguished by its spotted or
partially spotted coat (which can be of any color). These are light
but sturdy steeds standing 57" to 64" tall. Their name comes from
the Palouse River of Idaho and Washington, but to many Indians they
were "raindrop horses," for their markings.
During the Indian Wars on the Northern Plains (including the
Nez Perce War of 1877, when the army trailed Nez Perces from
Idaho almost to Canada for months), U.S. Army horses required
forage carried in supply wagons, and had difficulty crossing some
rivers. To cavalry commanders' frustration, the smaller and
sturdier Plains Indian horses (which they distinguished as
"ponies") ate natural grasses and more easily forded and swam
rivers. In short, army animals—unlike those that were
Indian-owned—had had some ability to live off the land bred out of
them.
1. Formerly, the North American
genus Hyracotherium was classified separately
as Eohippus, from the Greek eos (dawn)
and hippos (horse). Hyracotherium (here-uh-co-THEER-ee-um)
is modern Latin from the Greek hyrax (here-ucks) for a
small herbivore, and therion (THEER-ee-on) for wild
animal.
Primary Source
John C. Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian
Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1955), Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin #159.
Funded in part by a grant from the National Park Service, Challenge
Cost Share Program
—Barbara Fifer; 08/06
Mandan, Hidatsa, Sahnish
These resources are written to provide information about the
histories and cultures of the Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan,
Hidatsa, and Sahnish.
The Tribes believe their presence in North America is from the
beginning of time. The Mandan call themselves “the People of
the First Man.”
The Hidatsa were known as Minnetaree or GrosVentre. “Hidatsa” was
formerly the name of a village occupied by these tribes. The term
“Hidatsa” became a corruption of the word “midah-hutsee-ahti”
translated meaning “house/ lodge made with willows.” The name
Minnetaree, spelled in various ways means, “to cross the
water.”
Oral and written history says the names “Arikara, Arickara,
Ricarees and Rees” were given to them by the Pawnee and other
informants to describe the way they wore their hair. The name
“Sahnish” is the chosen name used among themselves which
means “the original people from whom all other tribes
sprang.” For purposes of this guide, the name of “Arikara” and
its derivations which appear in treaties and in reference to legal
documents will be used to preserve historical accuracy. All other
references to these people will use the term “Sahnish.”
Although sharing cultures and histories for so long, the people
keep a distinct sense of tribal relationships
Tribal Historical Overview
The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara live in the Missouri River area.
Historians document the first tribe to occupy this area was the
Mandan with the Hidatsa, and the Arikara moving up the river later.
One group of Hidatsa came from the east.
The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara have separate and distinct
narratives of their origins. The origins of the several bands
within each group are separate. The Mandan indicate that there are
two prevalent origin theories. One theory is that the Mandan
migrated north along the Mississippi River area through southern
Minnesota and northern Iowa to the plains in South Dakota.
Archaeological findings and carbon dating indicates that the Mandan
inhabited a village in the Heart Butte area about 900 A.D. Another
theory is that the Mandan originated in the area some distance
south of the Scattered Village site in what is now Mandan, North
Dakota. The Hidatsa moved from central Minnesota to the eastern
part of what is now North Dakota near Devils Lake, and moved to
join the Mandan at the Missouri River about 1600 A.D. The Mandan
and Hidatsa believe they were created in this area and have always
lived here. According to anthropologists, the Sahnish people lived
in an area that extended from the Gulf of Mexico, across Kansas,
Nebraska, and South Dakota.
Dates of migrations of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara have been
determined by archaeological investigation of village sites
constructed along the Missouri River and elsewhere. Many of these
sites, although collapsed and abandoned long before, were excavated
along the Missouri River during the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1995 the State Historical Society of North Dakota completed the
Missouri Trench National Historical Landmark Theme Study that
summarized the archaeological investigation of the Missouri River
area from southern South Dakota through North Dakota to Montana.
Many of the sites were of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara
origins.
Ethnographers (people who study cultural societies) group people by
the languages they used or were likely to be used by a single group
at one time. Indian nations were divided into several linguistic
groups. The Mandan and Hidatsa tribes belong to the Siouan
linguistic group, along with the Crow, Dakota, Lakota, Yanktonai,
Assiniboine, Iowa-Oto-Missouri, Quapaw, and
Omaha-Ponca-Osage-Kansa. The Arikara (Sahnish) belong to the
Caddoan linguistic group, along with the Pawnee, Caddo, Wichita,
Anadarko, Skidi, Tawakoni, and Waco.
This guide links the oral and written histories of the Mandan,
Hidatsa, and Sahnish to provide a more accurate viewpoint. The oral
tradition preserved the history and ceremonies of the Tribes
through a strict and sacred process, thereby adding to the validity
of oral tradition.
TRADE
Centuries before Euro-American penetration of the Far West, Native
Americans had established networks of trails and trade
relationships. Prized trade commodities such as marine shells,
obsidian, and turquoise were located hundreds, and in some cases,
thousands of miles from their origins. Among closely related tribal
groups, intra-regional exchange of commodities bearing common
social and ceremonial value was well organized throughout the
continent. In addition, certain places served as important “trade
centers” (Ewers 1968) with routes to other elaborate
“trade nets.” (W.R. Wood 1972, 1980)
The tribes of the Mississippi River and the West were linked by a
web of commercial relationships prior to European contact.
Indian-white trade relations were an outgrowth and creation of
Native trade patterns rather those of European design. (Ewers,
1968)
Primary Trade Centers for the Southwest and Plains. (Map
adapted from N.R. Wood, 1972 and 1980, from Swagerty, in the
Handbook of the North American Indians, Volume 4, page 352.)
Pre- and proto-historic patterns of Indian trade persisted at
traditional primary and secondary centers. Although later modified
by European ideas and commodities, inter-Indian trade among the
Plains, Southwest, and Great Basin tribes in historic times was
significant. (Vol. 9:201-205; Vol. 11:238-255)
It is not clear how many and from what distance separate groups
traveled to the trading places of the Missouri River (Bowers,
11950:14-118; W.R. Wedel 1961:181-193), however by 1805 Crow,
Assiniboine, Plains Cree, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache,
and Comanche of the Plains traded dried meat, deer hides, bison
robes, mountain sheep bows, and other leather goods for garden
produce and Knife River flint at the Mandan-Hidatsa center and were
occasionally joined by bands of Teton Sioux at the Arikara center
on a regular basis. (Ewers 1968: 17-18; Wood and Thiessen
1985:4-5)
All major trade centers were located among established and
sedentary native populations with surplus-abundant economies able
to selectively harvest and trade food and other commodities.
On the northern Plains, well before horses and European trade goods
intensified the frequency and diversity of intertribal exchanges, a
self-sufficient and surplus-abundant trading system as elaborate as
that of the Southwest had been long established. The primary
focuses of this system were the earthlodge villages of the
Mandan-Hidatsa near the mouth of the Knife River in present-day
North Dakota, and the Arikara near the mouth of the Grand River in
present-day South Dakota.
The geographic location was as a valuable resource as was the craft
specialization that enabled the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara to
assume the position of middlemen linking riverine horticulturalist
with upland hunters. (Ewers 1954; 1968:14-33) This
east-west network was labeled the Middle Missouri
System. (W.R. Wood 1972, 1980)
Fur Trade
The significance of the fur trade was an involved and complicated
part of Indian-white relations. Euro-American efforts to find and
extract resources from lands occupied by Indian tribes had its
greatest impact on Indian tribes universally.
Among the more extractive industries was the fur
trade. (Chittenden 1902; Innis 1962; P.C. Phillips
1961) The fur trade of the Far West extended and was built
upon by long established Indian trade networks that involved the
exchange of numerous commodities in addition to undressed pelts and
hides. Second, there is no single contact experience or pattern of
response in the Mississippi River area and the West even within
culture areas or among close linguistic relatives.
This relationship was felt in other than economic terms. The
ecological impact of commercial fur hunting was greatest on
previously stable ecosystems (Wishart 1970; Kay 1979), the
cultural impact because of the significance of fur-bearing animals
played in the mythology, religious observances, diets, and material
cultures of various Native Americans societies.
The trade may well have been the most important meeting round
between Indians and whites from first encounter to the beginning of
the reservation era. (Peterson and Anfinson 1984)
The role and impact of the fur trade on the Mandan, Hidatsa, and
Arikara is succinctly described by author Adrian Dunn in
1969:
“The fur trade era with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara was the
motive for much of the early exploration of the frontier. It was
also a prime factor in the destruction of their traditional
cultures. The trade in the Upper Missouri became highly
competitive, and in their quest for profits, corrupt traders
resorted to the most brazen forms of deceit and trickery. Most
harmful was the unrestrained use of whiskey in trading with the
Indians, who were physically and spiritually defenseless to
alcohol. Little regard was shown for the Indians’ welfare by the
fur companies, but the damage could not have been nearly so
devastating had it not been for the cooperation of the Indian
agents of the United States government. The crime of traders,
politicians, and other exploiters during this era, was that not
only did they steal the Indians’ land, they crushed their spirit
and destroyed their cultures.” (Dunn, 1963, p. 235)
Delegation of Arikaras, Gros Ventres, and Mandans meet with
President Grant, 1874. (Photo courtesy of the State Historical
Society of North Dakota, Col. 0384-01-1)
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation Today. Map shows Lake
Sakakawea and the inundated communities after the construction of
Garrison Dam. (Map adapted from Meyers, 1977, page 193)
Chairman Gillette Weeps. George Gillette, Sahnish Chairman,
and the Business Council witnessing the sale of 155,000 acres of
land for the Garrison Dam and Reservoir. (Courtesy of the
Associated Press, May 20, 1948, #1393)
In the early 1980s, the Three Affiliated Tribes sought compensation
for lands that were lost to construction of the Garrison Dam. A
committee was established to gather testimony and evidence in
hearings held on the Standing Rock and Fort Berthold Reservations,
as well as other sites. The Final Report of the Garrison Diversion
Unit Commission pointed out that “the Tribes of the Standing Rock
and Fort Berthold Reservations shouldered an inordinate share of
the cost of implementing the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program’s
mainstream reservoirs. (Final GDUC Report, Appendix F, p.
57) This report highlighted the inequities borne by the
tribes:
· The tribes were not only unwilling to sell their land, but
strongly opposed the taking of their land.
· They felt intimidated by the fact that construction on the dams
began before Indian lands were acquired. They then felt that the
taking of their lands was inevitable.
· During the negotiation phases, assurances were given expressly or
by implication by various federal officials that problems
anticipated by the Indians would be remedied. The assurances raised
expectations which, in many cases, were never fulfilled.
· The quality of replacement homes was inadequate in many respects,
but most notably with regard to insulation and construction
necessary to meet severe climatic conditions. The deficiencies, in
many cases, resulted in inordinately high heating bills.
· Indian lands taken were “prime river bottomland” and the most
productive parts of the reservation.
· The quality of life enjoyed by the tribes on the river
bottomlands had not been replicated in the removal areas.
· The rise in the incidence of trauma and stress-related maladies
and illnesses following removal suggested a causal
relationship.
· They were not justly compensated by the United States for the
taking of their lands and related expenses resulting from the land
taken.