Germs, Horses, and Guns

In the white man's subjugation of the Plains Indians, no one factor was more important than the introduction of smallpox. With virtually no immunity, probably the result of a "cold screen" in the Bering Strait area that served as a barrier to most virulent disease germs common to the Old World, the first residents of the Western Hemisphere were literally decimated by this vicious disease. Following sixteenth century epidemics in Mexico and Canada and one in New England during the French and Indian War of the 1750's, the Indians of the Great Plains experienced the full wrath of smallpox in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Mandans were virtually annihilated by the illness in the 1830's; entire villages of Arikaras, Assiniboins, and Crows were destroyed, and in less than a year the Pawnees lost over two thousand of their people. In the previous century the Comanches may have been reduced by at least fifty percent, and as late as the mid-1850's, the Kansa-Kaws suffered the premature death of more than twenty-five percent of their people. Malnutrition, cholera, and various intestinal and respiratory diseases also took their toll. Alcohol introduced by profit-minded traders was no less devastating. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that well before the beginning of Indian-white warfare after 1850, most of the Great Plains tribes were existing as simple survival cultures.

Pawnee tipi: They ranged from twelve foot portable ones to 30-foot family lodges which encompassed 700 square feet.

Based in Mexico, the Spaniards were responsible for introducing the horse to the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains. Efforts to prevent this efficient means of transportation from falling into the hands of the more sedentary people they conquered were unsuccessful, and by the mid-seventeenth century Ute and Apache bands were raiding far to the southwest for more horses. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 resulted in the Indians acquiring large herds, and in short order the animals were dispersed from one tribe to another. By 1750 horses were in the hands of nearly every tribe of the Plains. Now the semi-horticultural people on the eastern fringe could make regular hunting trips to the western bison country with greater confidence and security, while the Indians of the Plains proper could move about almost at will - depending, of course, on their wealth in guns, powder, and horses.

What might be designated as "the gun-horse craze" encouraged a revolutionary restlessness that undermined ancient values and fractured traditional cultural groupings. In present Wyoming, for example, the Comanches abandoned their Shoshone kinsmen and moved south to stake a domain more strategically positioned for horse-raising in Texas and Mexico. On the Colorado-Wyoming border, under the influence of fur traders and whiskey peddlers, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes divided into Northern and Southern triblets. The Otoe-Missouris, Kansa-Kaws, Osages, and Pawnees became more nomadic, while far to the northeast, bands of Woodland Ojibwas and Crees who had secured arms and powder from the French into the early 1600's, adjusted with remarkable quickness. Their aggressive move onto the Plains severely disrupted the Dakota people, who in turn divided into farmer and blanket factions. To the more conservative, traditional clansmen in all these tribes, these changes were often incomprehensible, and in any case, an ominous foretelling of the future.

Inter-tribal rivalry for the possession of guns and horses accelerated, as did the Indians' dependence on alcohol, cloth, coffee, and sugar, provided by agents of the great fur companies in New York and St. Louis. In terms of lasting effect, the situation facing the Plains Indians by the introduction of fossil fuel, the internal combustion engine, and assembly-line manufacture of automobiles in America one century later.