Indian children played with toy bows and arrows, and often put each other’s eyes out. There were many one-eyed Indians. Indian children did not have to be in bed by a certain hour, and often stayed up through the night. The historian Francis Parkman, when he lived in a Sioux camp in 1846, kept a short stick for punching the heads of kids who climbed on him in his sleep. An Indian camp in no danger of attack was likely to be noisy all night long. People chanted, dogs howled, women mourned, gamblers shouted. Many Indians loved to gamble, and played guessing games with objects hidden in one hand or the other. Many also knew card games like monte, poker, and seven-up. In winter camps, gambling was sometimes about all the men did.

  Most Indians did not know how old they were. They measured time in days, moons, and winters, but they had no weeks, hours, or minutes. On the eve of an important event, when they were afraid they might oversleep in the morning—for example, when a war party discovered an enemy camp and wanted to make sure to wake up and attack it at first light—Indians would drink a lot of water before going to bed.

  Indians loved crowbars. They used them for digging prairie turnips, bitterroot, tobacco root, and holes for tipi poles. When freshly pitched, tipis were nice inside, with the grass still green and fresh. It took twelve to fourteen tanned buffalo hides to make an average-sized tipi, and as many as fifty to make a big one. As the hides aged, they became like parchment, and let more light through. At night, a tipi with a cooking fire inside was a cone of light. A fully equipped tipi had almost as many ropes, lines, pegs, and parts as an old-time sailing vessel. Women were in charge of putting up and taking down tipis; Kit Carson, the famous frontier scout, lived for years in a tipi with no idea how to pitch one. Tipi poles were made of the slender trunks of young lodgepole pines, and were rare items on the treeless plains. Tribes made special trips to the Rockies or the Black Hills to get them. Since the poles dragged on the ground behind horses during moves, they quickly wore down. All plains tribes constructed tipis with poles set one after the other in a central framework of three or four poles. If you lay on your back and looked out the smoke hole in the top of the tipi, the poles made a spiral going up into the sky.

  In the barter system of the plains, five tipi poles might equal one horse. Price in this system varied with circumstance, but the horse served as a loose standard. One good horse might be worth a panther skin, an eagle tail of twelve feathers, eight or ten peyote beans, two gallons of shucked corn, or six tanned buffalo robes. Mules were hardier and rarer than horses, so one mule was worth at least two horses. Indian women liked to decorate their dresses with the smooth lower incisors of the elk; one horse was worth 100 to 150 elk teeth. Two knives, a pair of leggings, a blanket, a gun, a horse, and a tipi might be the price of one wife. A wife, if she worked hard, could prepare ten buffalo robes for trade in a season. At the traders’, one buffalo robe was worth from seven to nine cups of sugar. A white mackinaw blanket with a black stripe—Indians preferred that style, so it was more expensive—cost two or three robes. Indian men learned that the more wives they had, the more robes they had to trade. A dressed deer skin equalled from fifteen to twenty rifle balls and powder, an elk skin from twenty to twenty-five. All the meat of one buffalo cow was worth from twenty to forty balls and powder, depending on how far away the herds were. A prime beaver pelt was worth $6 to $8 a pound. For ten months of work, setting traps in cold water, dodging Indians, starving, freezing, getting attacked by bears, a trapper made about $150. The boatmen who brought trade goods up the Missouri as far as the Yellowstone made $220 for the round trip. Prices at the trading posts averaged nine times higher than back East. There were no pennies on the Great Plains—west of St. Louis, the nickel was the smallest coin. Indians used gold and silver coins for buttons on their shirts. When a band of Indians plundered a Missouri River keelboat carrying $25,000 worth of gold dust in buckskin sacks, they poured the gold dust onto the sand and kept the buckskin sacks.

  All kinds of Indians lived on the plains. In fact, after the coming of the horse, iron, and colored beads, but before smallpox, alcohol, and the Army, Indians generally prospered and multiplied on the plains. The Sioux, who moved there from the lake region of present-day Minnesota in the mid-eighteenth century, were also called the western or the Teton Sioux, to distinguish them from the Yankton and the Santee Sioux, who remained in the East. On the plains, the Teton Sioux soon numbered seven bands: the Hunkpapa, the Oglala, the Miniconjou, the Oohenonpa, the Sihasapa, the Sicanju, and the Itazipcho. The Sioux’s favorite enemy, the Crows, were originally Hidatsa who had moved west from the Missouri River in the 1700s after an argument between two chiefs. The Crows were also called the Absaroka, and they hunted in the Yellowstone valley. Later, other bands of Crows moved even farther west, to the Rockies, so then there were River Crows and Mountain Crows. To the north of the Crows were the Blackfeet, a tribe which killed white trappers by the score, and which ranged into the Canadian plains. The Blackfeet divided themselves into the Bloods, the Piegans, and the Northern Blackfeet. To the northeast of the Blackfeet were the Atsinas, who did not trap beaver, and the Crees, who did. Traders liked the Crees better than the Atsinas, which made the Atsinas hate the Crees. There were Plains Crees, Woodland Crees, and Swampy Crees.

  The Cheyenne, who also once lived in Minnesota, hunted the region of the Black Hills and the central plains. In the early nineteenth century, many Cheyenne moved south, to the present-day Oklahoma and Kansas, so the tribe became the Northern Cheyenne and the Southern Cheyenne. To the west of the Cheyenne were their allies the Arapahos, also divided into Northern and Southern branches, and to the west of the Arapahos, roughly speaking, were the Shoshone, sometimes called the Snakes. In the southwest were the Kiowa, the Kiowa Apache, and the Comanche. The Comanche lived mainly in present-day Texas, and raided as far south as Central America. There were five major bands of Comanche, with names that meant Honey Eaters, Those Who Turn Back, Antelope, Buffalo Eaters, and Root Eaters. Lots of other tribes, like the Pawnee, the Miami, the Otoes, the Osages, the Arikara, the Delawares, the Tonkawas, the Kansas, sometimes came to the plains to hunt or fight from the south and east, as the Flatheads and the Nez Percé and the Utes and the Apaches came from the west. I pass over which several of the plains tribes were also known at one time or another as the Gros Ventre (Big Bellies). Often, bands within the tribes were further divided into sub-groups along kinship lines. Most of the tribes would steal horses from or fight most of the others. The fact that their culture tended to fragment itself into so many different tribes and bands was probably a disadvantage to the Indians in the long run. But it certainly was a big help to early pioneers trying to come up with colorful place-names.

  The Sioux disinfected the navels of newborn babies with the powder from a puffball. The Hidatsa, when travelling in winter, packed babies in cattail down. Sioux (and other Indian) children nursed until they were as old as four or five. White observers of Indian encampments were surprised to see children standing on the ground and nursing at women going about their chores. The Crows thought long hair was fashionable, and sometimes gummed horsetails into it to increase its length. In the 1830s, the Crows had a chief called Long Hair whose hair (all his own) was eleven feet six inches long. Measuring Long Hair’s hair was a favorite pastime of white travellers. The Crows were skilled horse thieves, and stole from everybody, including each other. They claimed never to have killed a white man except in self-defense. They explained to one trader that if they killed white men there would be fewer to rob.

  When the Crows killed a buffalo cow, they sometimes raped it. Crow men and women sometimes made love in public, in broad daylight. The Cheyenne were famous for their chastity. Many Cheyenne women belonged to a housewives’ guild, which taught domestic arts and decoration. Cheyenne women got together and bragged of their tanning or decorating feats the way the men bragged of feats of war. Many pieces of Cheyenne hide decoration and beadwork survive in modern museums. The Plains Cree never washed their clothes, just bought new ones at the trader’s twice a year. The Blackfeet, when their leather shirts got dirty, repainted them. The Blackfeet let each thumbnail grow long, until it crooked like a claw. They often made presents of their relatives’ corpses to whites. Cheyenne men, as an exercise in spiritual devotion, sometimes stood on a hill from sunrise to sunset without moving except to keep their faces turned to the sun, or stood in water up to their necks all day. The Crows chopped joints off their fingers in mourning so often that they hardly had a whole hand among them. The men generally saved their thumbs and one or two trigger fingers.

  Sioux medicine men collected tiny, glistening pebbles from anthills and used them in medicine rattles. The Hidatsa rushed eagerly into hailstorms and gathered hailstones to cool their tepid Missouri River drinking water. The Mandan and others loved European toys. The Cheyenne at one time painted their arrows blue, in reference to the waters of a sacred lake in the Black Hills. Cheyenne warriors put on their best clothes and painted themselves and rebraided their hair before going into battle; if they didn’t have time to, they ran away. Whenever the Assiniboin sent each other presents of food, they also sent along a little boy to bring back the dish. The Assiniboin cleaned their pipes with pointed sticks decorated with porcupine quills, which they carried stuck in their hair. The Sioux might eat a dead horse, but would never kill one for food. The Kiowa, when moving from a campground they especially liked, would leave strings of beads or little pouches behind, as a “gift to the place.” The Osages were said to be the best-looking of the plains tribes; Maria Tallchief, the ballerina who became the third wife of Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, is half Osage. Balanchine once said that by marrying her he had at last become truly American.

  The Arikara, also called the Rees, lived on the Missouri River in earth lodges, like the Mandan and the Hidatsa. According to reports of traders, the Arikara stuck their hair together with gum, clay, grease, and paint, had many large lice which they picked off each other and crushed between their teeth, practiced incest, communicated venereal diseases to their children, filled the spaces between their lodges with garbage, killed lone white men indiscriminately, were poor warriors and horse thieves, shot you with one hand while shaking hands with the other, gambled and smoked all winter, spent the summers sleeping, catching catfish, and chasing each other’s wives, and caused neighboring tribes on the Missouri to move away from them. Among the traders, the Arikara were known as the “Horrid Tribe.” What the Arikara called the traders is not recorded. Many nineteenth-century white observers liked to list Indian vices, sometimes switching to Latin when the subject was sex. That the Indians who were easiest to observe tended to be the ones most affected by white trade apparently never occurred to them.

  The Comanche, who probably killed more settlers than did any other American Indians, made a distinction among whites between Texans and all others. Then, as now, it was possible to tell the difference. Texans rode big Kentucky horses, did not parley or give presents, wore homespun clothes dyed butternut, and were trigger-happy. The Comanche hated Texans the most of all. The Comanche were a whirlwind on horseback, but awkward on foot. They were small and bandy-legged, the jockeys of the plains. Comanche raids against Spanish towns in Mexico kept the plains supplied with horses, and discouraged Spain from expanding her empire north. The Comanche had a lot to do, indirectly, with the development of the handgun. The first time the Texas Rangers used Samuel Colt’s new revolving pistol in a fight with Comanche was the first time they whipped them. The revolver was the perfect horseback weapon against an enemy who could shoot twenty arrows and ride three hundred yards in a minute. It amazed the Comanche, who remembered that encounter for generations. The rangers made suggestions to help Colt improve his gun, and gave him his first fame. The Comanche prided themselves on their stealth. They had a story about a tribesman who stole a sleeping woman from her husband’s side so quietly that neither woke. They often took captives during their raids, and sometimes raised them in the tribe. Women captives had an especially miserable time; even if they were rescued, they usually did not live long. The Comanche enjoyed torturing prisoners. After a day of torture, when they wanted to get some sleep, they would cut the prisoners’ tongues out. The Comanche thought the roadrunner was a good-luck charm, and hung its skin in their tipis. They also made fans of the tail feathers of the scissor-tail flycatcher, which they wore at the shoulder like epaulets. After the Army sent troops after them in the winter of 1874, and the Comanche lost many women and children, they surrendered their horses and guns and moved to reservations.

  Indians ate young, fat dogs (killed, singed, scraped of hair, gutted, beheaded, boiled, served unaccompanied—a delicacy), ants (scooped from anthills in the cool of the morning, washed, crushed to paste, made into soup), grasshoppers (taken in drives, then dried, boiled, or roasted), beaver tails (cut into small slices, boiled with prairie turnips until very tender—another delicacy), wild peas (robbed from the caches of field mice, boiled with fat meat), choke-cherries (stones and all, with a noise “fully as loud as horses eating corn,” according to one observer), rose pods (pounded, mixed with bone grease), buffalo berries, wild plums, turtle eggs, serviceberries, wild artichokes, morning-glory roots, cottonwood bark, wild onions, june-berries. They would eat a wild turkey only when they were near starvation. They did not eat many trout, although the soldiers who fought them caught and ate thousands. Indians thought eating pork was disgusting; some believed that the federal inspection stamp was in fact a tattoo, and the meat was white man.

  Of course, Indians mainly ate buffalo. There were maybe seventy million buffalo on the plains before white men came. Before the horse, Indians hunted buffalo by chasing them over blind cliffs (called buffalo jumps), up box canyons, or into steep-sided sand dunes where the animals’ cloven hoofs would flounder. Horses made hunting buffalo much easier. An Indian who chased a buffalo and killed it with a lance or an arrow might, if he was hungry, cut it open on the spot and eat the warm liver seasoned with bile from the gallbladder. The women followed to do the butchering, and could slice the meat as thin as paper. When it was hung on racks, the plains wind and sun dried it, and then it would last for months. The Comanche liked to kill young buffalo calves and eat the curdled, partially digested milk from the stomach. The Assiniboin made a dish of buffalo blood boiled with brains, rosebuds, and hide scrapings. The Arikara retrieved from the Missouri drowned buffalo so putrefied they could be eaten with a spoon. With stone mallets, Indians cracked buffalo bones to get at the marrow. There were cuts of buffalo just as there are of beef; the Hidatsa had names for twenty-seven different cuts. The Sioux boiled buffalo meat with heated rocks in a buffalo paunch, then ate the paunch, too. Roasted fat hump ribs, boiled tongue, and coffee was a meal Indians dreamed about. Buffalo meat did not make you feel full. Some Indians could eat fifteen pounds of buffalo meat at a sitting.

  Among the Indians, no part of the buffalo was ever wasted—except sometimes, when a tribe might kill a herd of fourteen hundred and cut out the tongues to take to the traders for whiskey, or when a war party on enemy hunting grounds would shoot animals and leave them on the ground to rot. White people were likely to kill buffalo for pleasure. Noblemen from the British Isles took long safari-like hunting expeditions on the plains and killed thousands. Early travellers on the Oregon Trail hunted when they got a chance, and the buffalo split into two herds, the northern and the southern, to avoid them. Nobody in history, however, consumed buffalo the way the railroads did. Between 1867 and 1880, the Union Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Santa Fe all reached the Great Plains. The remaining buffalo—maybe thirty or forty million—disappeared up the tracks like water up a straw.

  Not that any industry was crying out for buffalo products at the time. Fresh buffalo meat was hard to ship, because it would not travel except in the cold months. Buffalo hams and tongues were complicated to smoke or salt. The easiest part of the buffalo to move was the hide. All you had to do was shoot the buffalo, skin it, scrape the flesh from the hide, and peg the hide out on the ground to dry. You were left with a hard, flat thing with hair on one side, a thing which could be stacked and bailed and loaded in freight cars. When these hides (called flint hides) arrived in the East, they proved more difficult than cowhide to tan commercially. But since the hides were cheap, tanners soon solved the problem. Tanned buffalo leather is too soft and pliant to use for shoes or belts or harnesses, but it makes excellent buffing rags. Tanneries eventually bought hides by the millions. In New York, the price of a buffalo hide went from $1.25 to $3.50 in just a few years. From the railheads, professional buffalo hunters fanned out across the plains.

  These hunters preferred to be called “buffalo runners,” but they did not chase buffalo and shoot them from horseback. Once they found a herd, they sneaked up to within rifle range on foot. Some wore kneepads to help them crawl. Then they set their sixteen-pound guns on a rest of crossed hardwood sticks and shot buffalo one after another with bullets an inch long and half an inch across. Many buffalo hunters used the fifty-caliber Sharps buffalo rifle, which could kill a buffalo bull at six hundred yards and a man at up to a mile. The hunters tried to kill as many animals as possible in one spot, for the convenience of their partners who did the skinning. Buffalo hunters usually worked in parties of four, with one shooter, two skinners, and one hide stretcher and cook. Everybody wanted to be the shooter. On a busy day, the guns heated up quickly. If the hunter had no water to pour on the barrel, he might urinate on it. Many skinners used mules to pull the hides off. At night, the men sometimes got out a fiddle and pegged down a dry buffalo hide and danced on it. They wore heavy clothes which they seldom changed. Dried blood caked in their beards. When a group of them walked up to a bar, they would reach into their clothes, and the last one to catch a louse had to buy. The prostitutes who catered to them were a special type.

 

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