Crow

• Would travel to the Arkansas' hot springs to gather together with other tribes to hunt, trade, and take the healing waters. Even when their peoples were at war, individuals of opposing tribes could come together here in safety and peace.
  
  
• The Crow tell of a vision quest shared by two brothers. In the vision one received gift of corn, and his people became sedentary villagers. The other was given sacred tobacco seeds and instructed to lead his people all around the Plains before settling in a promised land-the Bighorn country of present-day Montana. There they would flourish so long as they grew the sacred tobacco.
  
• According to Crow storytellers, their forefathers successfully goaded buffalo to their deaths by "buffalo jumps" only when a gifted shaman oversaw the proceedings. At the start, hunt leaders would position women and children behind piles of stones arranged in a V-shape that narrowed to a point at the edge of a sheer cliff. The buffalo were enticed to enter the wedge by a slow-hobbling man disguised in a fur robe. Other people brought up the rear, yellng and flapping robes and waving the scented smoke of burning cedar in the air. This gave the impression of a terrifying forest fire, causing the great beasts to stampede over the edge of the cliff. Down below, a makeshift enclosure prevented wounded animals from escaping, while arrows and spears rained down from all sides until the lifeless carcasses could be approached by the butchering parties.
  
  Nearby, on the flat prairie, there would be a campsite where women quartered and finally "flaked" the fresh meat, slicing very thin strips and drying them on pole racks. The dried meat was later prepared in various ways; a favorite and highly nutritious method was to pound it with granite pestles, blending in dried berries and buffalo tallow, and finally packing the mix into rawhide containers later winter consumption.
  
• For pack animals, these early Plains folk used domesticated dogs, whose narrow snouts and bushy tails suggested their probable kinship to coyotes. Short tepee poles were lashed to a harness over their haunches, creating a drag platform (French Canadian traders later termed it a travois) that the dogs pulled between campsites. In those days tepees were probably no more than ten feet high, pack loads were light, and the distance a hunting band might cover in a day was relatively short.
  
• The Crow inhabited around the Yellowstone River, south of the Blackfeet tribe. However, early Plains people, including the Crow, would shift location more than once and consequently pursue several different Plains lifestyles.
  
• Warrior societies among the Plains tribes, were "age-graded". Boys grew up through membership in an advancing series of societies, each with increased responsibilities. A few of the groups followed an extreme warrior code...The Crazy-Dogs-Wishing-to-Die of the Crow staked their shoulder sashes to the ground with special spears, vowing to fight to the death unless releasd by a fellow warrior.
  
• Throughout the Plains, women based their reputations upon the artistry they brought to the making of pots, baskets, cradleboards, robes, moccasins, and beadwork...The burgeoning fur trade provided a ready market for the hides and pelts that women processed for export. Women's products were also coveted items on the intertribal trading network: 18th century Europeans witnessed the Crow and Sioux trading decorated shirts, leggings, and animal-skin robes with the Mandan-Hidatsa for squash, corn, beans, tobaco, and guns.
  
  Because of the prosperity of the family-and community as a whole-was so closely tied to a woman's productivity...special status was granted, for example, to a woman who had prepared 30 buffalo robes for trade.
  
• Throughout the Plains, men and women alike sought spiritual power through dreams, visions, sacred bojects, and songs that could impart special luck or the ability to alter events in their favor....to the Crow, the power was maxpe in English it is usually translated as "medicine".
  
  At the time of puberty almost every Plains Indian boy set out on vision quests-periodic wilderness retreats in which the initiate hoped to receive guidance from the spirit world. Only with the aid of special power beings-such as the spirits of eagles, hawks, or bears-it was believed, could a person gain that extra jolt of supernatural assistance needed to succeed in war, curing, love, or tribal leadership.
  
  After a purifying "sweat" in a bowl-shaped sweat bath framed with willows, shrouded with buffalo hides, and steam-heated with hot rocks splashed with water, the young quester shouldered his sleeping hide and trekked to a sacred butte. At the summit he fasted for four days, wept and prayed naked before the elements, and sometimes went so far as to cut off a finger to entice a spirit to grace him with an empowering vision.
  
  After the quester returned to camp and again entered a purifying sweat bath, elders helped him assemble objects that his spirit guide had instructed him to collect. Wrapped in a skin, these items were known as a medicine bundle and were a warrior's dearest possessions. They might be unwrapped prior to any perilous enterprise when a man needed the sacred protection that had been granted him during his original vision. Horses were often symbolized in these bundles. A Crow warrior might keep a red-winged blackbird stuffed with buffalo hair in his bundle because the bird was known to hover around tethered horses, and hence the bundle had the power to bring its owner and horses together.
  
• Most Plains tribes, in addition, had sacred objects that were unique to their history and as essential to their collective identity as their language. The Crow had Tobacco Society bundles that carried the sacred tobacco seeds-seeds upon which the very survival of the Crow as a people was believed to depend. Clans or religious socities paid homage to these special medicine bundles, which they owned collectively, opening them in religious gatherings held during the first thurnderstorm of spring or the first snowfall of autumn.
  
• Some historians suggest that the Sun Dance appeared around 1700, possibly originating with the Cheyenne. To the Plains Indians, however, the ceremony was ageless-a divine gift from the supernatural world. In any case, by 1750 virtually every Plains tribe practiced some variation of the Sun Dance. Whatever similarities their Sun Dances may have shared, each tribe put its stamp of symbolism and interpretation on the ritual. For the Crow it was unashamedly an opporutnity to secure war-making power for successful revenge against enemies. For every group, however, these rituals served a deeply felt need on the part of the entire tribe to unite behind a common supernatural enterprise.
  
• Warriors on horseback wielded small shields painted with powerful symbols such as medicine bears and birds to protect them from enemy fire. Bows were shortened and laminated for greater power, and clubs and short lances were crafted for close combat. The use of firearms in warfare was not adopted throughout the Plains Indian world as readily as that of horses. Before the arrival of repeating rifles, warriors had to rely on smooth-bore muzzle-loaders, which were not very accurate and could not be fired as rapidly as arrows in the heat of battle.
  
  Highest honors were accorded the daring warrior who risked all to "count coups." A French word meaning "stroke" or "blow," coup could signify any sort of damage or humiliation inflicted upon an enemy in war. Coups were the means by which a warrior gained status in his tribe, and they were scrupulously ranked-striking an enemy with a gun, bow, or riding quirt, for instance, might be considered a higher achievement than actually killing him. Other honors were granted for stealing horses, riding down an enemy, recovering his weapon, or scalping him.
  
  Warriors proudly recollected their notable coups on formal occasions and recorded them with appropriate insignia, such as specially trimmed feathers, marks on their horses' flanks, beaded or quillwork strips on the war shirts, or pictographs painted on buffalo robes and tepee covers.
  
• One product of the white man's world began t spread across the Plains: disease. Pictorial calendar records, known as Winter Counts, kept by Missouri Riber villagers document six major epidemics between 1725 and 1802, with the first onslaught of small pox striking the Plains Indians about 1780. If even a single member of a village returned from a visit to another tribe or a trading post with skin sores and high fever, the community was lucky of anyone was alive a few months later.
  
  In the winter of 1839-40, the Winter Count of the Kiowa is remembered by a single pictograph: a man covered with red spots. The Mandan and Hidatsa were not the only ones to suffer from the "smallpox winter." It showed no favorites, killing perhaps 8,000 Blackfeet, 2,000 Pawnee, and 1,000 Crow. People committed suicide in vast numbers when the disease descended on their villages. All across the northern and southern Plains, the bodies piled up too quickly to be given decent burial. They were heaped in mass graves or thrown into the river.
  
• In 1868, the Crow of south-central Montana were given protection by US troops on their own reservation due to Sioux aggression.
  
• On the Great Plains, Indian agents in the 1880's had put a halt to the Sun Dance, a major yearly ritual for more than 20 different tribes, because it was considered "pagan." Catholic boarding schools on Montana's Crow Reservation helped discourage such "offenses" as the Sun Dance and polygamy.
  

Dakota/Santee Sioux

• The Dakota (or Santee which were the easternmost tribe of the Sioux) Sioux were located west of the northern Mississippi River. They were ancient enemies of the Fox and Ojibwa tribes. Seasonal warfare was constant in this area. They found themselves in bloody competition over the same inventory of natural resources. Both the Ojibwa and Dakota/Santee harvested wild rice in the fall, hunted in the winter, made maple sugar in the spring, and farmed in midsummer.
  
• By the 1770's the Santee Sioux of central Minnesota had become an equestrian people. So was born the classic image of Plains Indians: the arrival of the horse gave rise to the war-bonneted, face-painted, mobile peoples whose way of life, at once spiritual and militaristic, captured the world's imagination.
  
• As horse-rich tribes staked out their favored roaming and hunting territories in the plains, they forged military alliances based sometimes on shared cultural traditions and sometimes purely on the existence of common enemies....But there was another great alliance that threatened all the others with aggressive militarism and overwhelming numbers: the "seven council fires" of the Sioux. Altogether they amounted to some 25,000 loosely affiliated tribesmen in the 1790's. The four Eastern groups were known collectively as the Dakota, or Santee Sioux. In the middle were the Yankton and Yanktonai, keepers of the sacred pipestone quarry. Fully 40% of the alliance belonged to the Teton, or Western, Sioux.
  
• In August 1862, four hungry young Santee Sioux men, hunters returning from another unsuccessful outing, stole some eggs fromt he homestead of a white farmer near the small community of Acton in the Minnesota River valley. For years, supplies pledged to the tribe by treaty in exchange for prime hunting lands had been systematically diverted-then sold to their rightful recipients by local merchants at exorbitant prices. The training and euqipment that would make them self-sufficient farmers never materialized. Complaints of illiegal liquor sales and outrages against Indian women by whites were ignored by authorities. The fall harvest of 1861 had been blighted by an infestation of cutworms, and the bitterly cold winter that followed left the Santee impoverished, half starved, and desperate.
  
  Their 52-year-old chief, Little Crow, tried without success to get provisions from the local Indian agent of credit from local traders. "If they are hungry" said one storekeeper, "let them eat grass." The egg-stealing indicent rapidly boiled upinto a confrontation that left the farmer and four family members dead. With no more premeditation than a summer stomr, the Sioux Uprising of 1862 had begun.
  
  Tribal leaders hurriedly met with Little Crow, who agreed to lead them but harbored no illusions whatever about their chances. In the next four weeks the Sioux lashed out against settlers in surprise skirmishes and large scale battles up and down the Minnesota Valley. Hundreds of whites were killed and an estimated 30,000 others frantically sought refuge at Ft Ridgley. Little Crow, wounded in an attack on the fort, turned over his command to Chief Mankato. But then in the fierce battle of Wood Lake in late September, Mankato was killed by a cannonball-some said he refused to dodge it-and his warriors were routed by federal troops.
  
  Some 1,700 captured Sioux were marched to Ft Snelling, where they were enclosed in a wooden stockade with scant food and little shelter against the approaching winter cold. Trials were held and more than 300 of the men were condemned to death. Back in Washington, President Lincoln was besieged by demands from his own military advisers-as well as an aroused national press-for quick executions. One lone voice of dissent was that of Henry Whipple, an Episcopal bishop and longtime advocate of the Sioux, who appealed to the president for clemency. Lincoln considered his plea and commuted the sentences of all but 39 of the prisoners, who were promptly separated from the rest to await their fate in Mankato, Minnesota.
  
  As the sun rose on December 26,1862, the prisoners began chanting their death songs, which they continued to sing as the scaffold was nailed together and white cowls were rolled down over their faces. When the trapdoor dropped beneath their feet, it was the largest mass execution ever to take place in American history. Little Crow was not among the victims, but six months later, while picking berries on a farm, he was shot to death by the owner. The state of Minnesota rewarded his killer with $500.
  
• After the tragic events of 1862, many Sioux decided they had seen enough bloodshed and worked to establish peaceable communities among their white neighbors. One group took refuge in Canada and sought help from the British, their former allies during the days of George III. Reluctantly, the Hudson's Bay Comapny provided land near Manitoba's Ft Garry for the impoverished exiles. Some Canadians feared a repeat of the violence in Minnesota, but the Sioux proved content to trap, hunt, and lead quiet lives as farmers and ranchers. They even remained neutral during the Metis Rebellion of 1869, an outburst with origins a century old.

Delaware

• The northeast coastal regions were occupied for many ages by tribes of people who spoke Algonquian languages including the Delawares. Descended from earlier immigrants to the region, the Algonquians had found ingenious ways to use its resources. ...In short, these people left no potential food source untapped. They gathered wild plants and cultivated domestic ones, including squash and later a hardy kind of corn adapted to the shorter growing season. Their villages were more or less permanent and had domed houses framed with saplings and covered with bark and animal skins.
  
• Delaware and Mahican men near what is today Manhattan Island remembered seeing "a house of various colors...crowded with living creatures" who turned out to be Dutch sailors. They welcomed the foreigners ashore; the sailors gave them alcohol, and they got drunk for the first time.
  
• The Delawares inhabited the southern most part of the northeastern tribal lands. They lived on the coast lines around New Jersey, east of the Susquehanna River and south of the Hudson River.
  
• On the lower Hudson River and Long Island, as many as 1,000 Wappinger and Delaware Indians died at Dutch hands in Governor Kieft's War between 1643 and 1645.
  
• No group signed away land more often than the Lenape-or Delaware, as they increasingly came to be known-who first encountered Europeans when living in what is today New Jersey. Between 1630 and 1767 the Delaware inked their personal marks on nearly 800 different land deeds. On the surface many of these documents were reasonable and fair. William Penn, the first governor of Pennsylvania, set an example of honest dealing when he drew up a celebrated peace treay with the Delaware leader Tammany in 1682, ushering in a half-century of trust between his Quaker colony and the local tribes.
  
  Unfortunately, the legacy of William Penn did not long outlive him.  In 1737 his son, Thomas Penn, convinced some Delaware chiefs to sign a deed that granted the colony as much land as a man could walk across in a day and a half. The Pennsylvanians cleared a path through the forest, but instead of one man walking, they produced a team of three runners. At noon of the second day, the last runner reached the end of his endurance-a full 65 miles from the starting point.
  
  The Delaware protested in vain. Time and again they sold lands and moved away, but the settlers kept coming, pushing them farther and farther west. By 1751 they had been forced beyond the Alleghenies. They migrated to Ohio, then across the Mississippi and out onto the Great Plains, until at last the majority of their descendants would settle in the far, dusty reaches of Kansas and Oklahoma.
  
• After the Treaty of Paris in 1763, more troubling was the fear that England's victory would bring in a surge of white settlers. Resentment was already building against the white presence, fueled by a Delaware holy man, Neolin, who lived among the refugee villagers of the Muskingum valley in Ohio. The Delaware Prophet, as he is more commonly known, delivered a scathing verbal assault on all whites, inflaming the tribes with a charismatic call for a return to the old ways-no more guns, no more trade goods, no more brandy or rum. To which an Ottawa chief named Pontiac listened....in May of 1763, Pontiac made his move. He laid siege to the British garrison at Detroit. Within weekd eleven frontier British forts had fallen to allied Indian warriors.
  
  By July only two besieged garrisons-Ft Pontchartrain at Detroit and Ft Pitt at the forks of the Ohio-still held out. To relieve Ft Pitt, Lord Amherst sent a task force of 450 veteran soldiers under Col. Henry Bouquet. Then, on his instructions, the fort commander invited the Delaware attackers to parley and presented them with a handkerchief and two blankets that had been infected with smallpox. Amherst's sinister experiment-perhaps the first use of germ warfare in American history-accomplished its goal. The epidemic spread through the Indian ranks and into their villages along the Ohio Valley. By autumn the siege had collapsed.
  
  But the rebellion had sent shock waves of alarm through Britain's Colonial administration. An estimated 2,000 British soldiers and settlers had lost their lives. Lord Amherst was recalled. Facing the prospect of extended off-and-on conflict in the west, the British began to build the same complex system of alliance and gift exchange that the French had maintained for a century and a half before them.
  
• In an attempt to impose order, the Indian superintendent in the area, Sir William Johnson, cobbled together a series of land treaties. In the fall of 1768, Johnson orchestrated the largest treaty conference ever-gathering 3,400 Iroquois an dother Eastern Indians, along with Shawnee and Delaware from the Ohio country, at Ft Stanwix in upstate New York. On the Colonial side were governors from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia, along with land speculators, missionaries, and trakders seeking compensation from losses during Pontiac's uprising.
  
  The resulting agreement opened all the land east of the Ohio River to white settlement. As it happened, however, the only Indians who signed it were leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy, acting without the knowledge or consent of the others. When the Delaware and Shawnee got down to examining the treaty's fine points, they discovered that most of the lands being given up fell within their own hunting grounds-and that the Iroquois were being well paid for this betrayal.
  
• At first, most Indian leaders saw the Revolution as a family quarrel betwen whites, fought over issues of little interest to them. But they soon were drawn in anyway-into a struggle to hold on to their homelands. Even before the first rifle shots were fired at Concord and Lexington, Virginia militiamen were battling Shawnee villagers for control of the Ohio Valley. All across the borderland, this was the beginning of a new chapter.
  
  Some tried to stay on the sidelines, but most were forced to choose. A faction of Delawares living near Ft Pitt signed an annual peace treaty with the Americans, who promised them a separate Delaware state at the war's end. But another Delaware group moved north to Sandusky, joining forces with the pro-British Huron. Indeed, the need to take sides sparked furious debate among many other groups, sometimes causing lasting rifts in the tribal councils. In the end most leaders decided their advantage lay with the British, who seemed more likely to respect the integrity of Indian lands.
  

Fox

• The Fox's homelands lay to the west of the Great Lake region. They were the Mesquakie, or Red Earth People, but became better known by the name French traders gave them-the Fox.
  
• The Fox were ancient enemeies of the Ojibwa and also of the Dakota (or Sioux) to their west in Minnesota.
  
• The Ojibwa developed an institution of great importance called the Grand Medicine Society, or Midewiwin, and initiated members into the knowledge and rituals of the Mide religion. As part of the initiation ceremonies, a leader recounted stories of the origin of the people near the salt seas who had been guided west by a sacred shell. Mide priests kept birchbark maps of the migration route with symbolic markings that indicated the songs and procedure for stages of the initiation rites. The Midewiwin promoted the knowledge of herbal medicine and advocated balance in all aspects of life.
  
  The religion spread among other Great Lakes tribes: Potawatomi, Ottawa, Sauk, Winnebago, Fox, Kickapoo, and Shawnee. Great Lakes Indians, like others, developed an extensive knowledge of plant medicine. There were medicines to attract animals to traps and snares and to lure fish; love medicines, cures for respiratory problems, and a whole catalog of human ailments, as well as contraceptive and abortion-inducing medications, insect repellents, and cures for poison ivy and snakebite.
  
• In the mid 1600's,French military posts sprang up all across the region, from the forests north of Lake Superior, along Lake Michigan, to the rivers of central Illinios. Green Bay became a major trading post. The surrounding native population may have reached as high as 20,000 as refugee bands poured in from the eastern battlegrounds.
  
  As tribes converged around the French installations, and the number of refugees increased, so did the frictions between competing trade groups. The large band of Ottawa at Michilimackinac became the principal middlemen for the Ojibwa in supplying furs to the French. In Green Bay the Potawatomi distributed lavish gifts in hopes of achieving the same end. The Fox, deeply concerned that European rifles were being traded to their arch-enemy, the Sioux, joined forces with the Iroquois in order to disrupt that deadly flow of merchandise-and at the same they hoped to obtain a larger share of beaver profits for themselves.
  
• As the bloodshed abated in the Upper Country, the governors of NewFrance took advantage of the lull to consolidate their position. Ambassadors went out from Montreal, inviting al the tribes to gather for a mass celebration of friendship and peace....Most of France's Indian alies readily agreed, and a large delegation of great Lakes leaers met with the French governor general-"Onontio," they called him-to pledge their loyalty. But the French also made a particular effort to bring in the Iroquois, hopeing to woo them from the British. The Iroquois councils deliberated in their unhurried, consensus-building manner for a full two years....Finally the day arrived. In midsummer of 1701 the canoes started landing on the beach at Montreal-Sauk, Fox and Wineebago, Potawatomi and Miami, Huron and Ojibwa, Kickapoo and Sioux. In addition to these french allied tribes came their former enemies, the Five Naitons of the Iroquois League-Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk.
  
  Close to 1,300 people attended, represting 39 separate tribes, and together they feasted and parleyed and smoked the calumet. But important issues remained unresolved. Far more difficult was the matter of the Fox.  All through the peace negotiations the Fox protested bitterly that French traders were still supplying their Sioux enemies with guns. Already the arms deals had driven them into a secret alliance with the Iroquois. Back in 1670, when Iroquois raiders attacked a Fox hunting camp in northeastern Illinois, the Fox elders made a decision not to retaliate. Instead, they sent a messenger suggesting that the Iroquois had surely mistaken the hunting party for someone else-Potawatomi, perhaps. Following this overture, the Fox ambassador returned with an Iroquois trading party, six canoe loads of merchandise, and an invitation to trade with the English in Albany.
  
  Forced to play both sides in the high-stakes game of woodland power politics, the Fox did not take kindly to insult or neglect. French arms continued flowing to both the Sioux and the Ojibwa. And no matter how loudly the Fox objected, the French refused to listen.
  
  The disputants came to blows at the new French garrison at Detroit. Founded in 1701 by soldier and trader Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, Detroit was rapidly becoming a major center for soldiers, traders, and French habitants, whose graceful windmills and long, narrow cornfields lined the Detroit River. A large community of Huron and Ottawa refugees already lived in the area. Cadillac, ambitious to expand the fur trade,invited other tribes to come settle. More Huron moved in, and a sizable group of Potawatomi. Then in 1710 there arrived 1,000 Fox from Wisconsin and with them, disaster.
  
  The newcomers expected to be treated as guests and accorded proper privileges. But Cadillac had been assigned to another post, and the new French commandant showed little interest in welcoming them. Following a series of violent incidents in 1712, French troops laid siege to the Fox village. A truce was negotiated, but the French promptly broke it. Then, as the Fox families tried to escape under cover of a nighttime thunderstorm, the soldiers moved in and slaughtered most of them.
  
  It was a betrayal the Fox never forgave. For the next quarter century Fox war parties staged lightning raids on key French outposts, crippling trade in the Upper Country. Nothing was safe. Isolated villages, canoe portage routes, even boats carrying corn from Detroit to Michilimackinac-Fox raiders hit them all.
  
  The French tried to crush them-repeatedly-butt he Fox always seemed to slip away. Superb military engineers, they fortified their villages with massive earthworks and oak-beam barricades.  In one such compound, at Butte de Mort in Wisconsin, 500 Fox warriors withstood a siege by a French army sent from Montreal, which bombarded them with cannon ferried in by reinforced canoes.
  
  Adroit Fox diplomacy enhanced their battlefield prowess. They made peace with the Ojibwa in 1724 and allied themselves in 1727 with their former enemies the Sioux. But the question of a new truce with the French opened a rift that could not be closed. Montreal enlisted its Indian allies, including most of the Great Lakes and Illinois tribes, and in 1728 sent a massive force into Fox country.
  
  The Fox by this time had split apart. One faction dispersed to continue waging war; the larger group headed east, hoping to find refuge with the Iroquois in New York. But in the prairies of central Illinois, they were seen by a band of Illinois hunters, who alerted the French. The Fox hastily fortified themselves in a village and soon came under attack. Among their opponents were the Sauk, who gave sanctuary to the Fox children, but of the adults remaining in the village, only 50 escaped death or capture. In the next decade, Fox survivors found refuge among the Sauk and negotiated another truce with the French-which the French again violated.
  
  Enraged, they lashed out and killed as many Frenchmen as they could, including the commandants at Green Bay and Michilimackinac. The French in response had their prize Fox hostages, Chief Kiyala and his wife, sold as slaves in Martinique. Finally, in 1742 the Fox ended the cycle of violence and betrayal by sending emissaries to Montreal to promise "Onontio" that they would wage war no more.