You know, usually when we talk about a map or
like a historical timeline, there's this expectation
of absolute precision. Right. Yeah, like it's
an engineering schematic or something. Exactly.
You look at the borders of a state, let's take
South Dakota, for example, and you see these
clean, straight, just uncompromising lines. You
read a textbook and the dates are just laid out,
one after the other, perfectly sequential. And
I mean, it all feels so binary. It's comforting,
really. It is. It gives us this illusion that
the ground beneath our feet has always been neatly
categorized. We naturally like things to be visible,
you know? They have a definitive beginning and
a definitive end. Right, a clean narrative. Exactly.
But a map is really just a snapshot. It's a single
frame taken at one specific millisecond of a
very long, very chaotic movie. But then you step
into the world of deep history, right? Specifically
the history of the land and the early inhabitants
of what we now call South Dakota. And suddenly
that modern map is entirely useless. Oh, completely
useless. The straight lines just vanish. The
neat categories dissolve. We're looking at a
historical landscape that is constantly, relentlessly
shifting under our feet. It is the absolute definition
of a dynamic living chessboard. What we are looking
at today is not just a snapshot of a few decades
or even a few centuries of American pioneer history.
Right. We are looking at an epic, sweeping narrative
of human adaptation that stretches back, well,
further than human civilization itself. And that
is exactly what we are doing today. So welcome
to the deep dive. For you listening right now,
we know your time is valuable. You want to cut
through the noise. Get straight to the actual
mechanisms of history. Yes, to get straight to
those aha moments. To understand the mechanics
without drowning in academic jargon. So our mission
today is a highly focused, in -depth exploration
into the early inhabitants of the Great Plains.
And specifically the epic, transformative rise
of the Sioux Nation. Exactly. And just so you
know where we're pulling this from, we are basing
our insights today on an extensive foundation
of historical research. We're drawing heavily
on comprehensive encyclopedic histories of the
South Dakota region. And to really grasp the
magnitude of the history we are about to explore,
we have to completely throw out our modern Western
sense of time. We have to zoom way, way out.
Right. We aren't just looking at the history
of the United States. We aren't even just looking
at the last thousand years. To understand the
geopolitical and cultural reality of this region,
we have to push back 17 ,000 years. Wow. 17 ,000.
Yes. We are talking about 17 millennia. of humans
adapting to extreme environments, of vast trading
empires rising and falling. Massive technological
arms races. Exactly. And profound cultural transformations
right there on the Great Plains. Okay, let's
unpack this. 17 ,000 years ago. To put that in
perspective for you listening, human beings hadn't
even figured out agriculture yet. No, not even
close. The wheel was thousands of years away
from being invented. The world is in the suffocating
grip of the last Ice Age. Huge swaths of the
Northern Hemisphere are buried under miles of
glacial ice. And our research notes that it's
during this incredibly hostile period that human
beings first entered North America. They came
via the Bering Land Bridge, that massive strip
of exposed land that once connected Siberia to
Alaska. Because so much of the earth's water
was locked up in those massive glaciers, sea
levels were drastically lower. Oh, right. So
it exposed the ocean floor. Exactly. It created
a temporary frozen highway. But it's vital to
understand who these people were. These were
not colonists looking to set up towns or plant
flags. Right. They weren't building cities. No.
These were highly mobile, deeply resilient, nomadic
hunter gatherers. They were operating with what
we would consider primitive Stone Age technology.
We're talking Spears, Lottles, Chipped Flint.
Yes. And they were walking into an ecosystem
that was fundamentally different from the Great
Plains we know today. And their entire existence
was predicated on a very specific, very dangerous
ecological reality. I mean, they were hunting
large prehistoric mammals right there in the
South Dakota area. The megafauna. Yeah. We are
talking about Colombian mammoths, ancient giant
ground sloths, prehistoric camels. I mean, just
pause and picture that for a second. It's hard
to even conceptualize. Imagine standing on the
rolling plains of South Dakota, feeling the freezing
wind coming off a distant glacier, and watching
a herd of prehistoric camels or a massive towering
mammoth just walk by. It sounds like science
fiction, honestly, but it was the absolute reality
of the Pleistocene epic. And the mechanics of
hunting these creatures with stone tools, it
required an astonishing level of coordination.
And intelligence, right, because you don't just
walk up to a mammoth and throw a rock at it.
No, you'd be crushed instantly. These early inhabitants
had to perfectly understand the migratory patterns
of megafauna. They had to use the landscape to
their advantage. Like driving them into natural
traps? Exactly. Perhaps driving these massive
animals into bogs or, you know, natural cul -de
-sacs where their immense size actually became
a disadvantage. They'd get stuck in the mud.
Right. And their tools, like the beautifully
crafted Clovis points, they were engineered specifically
to pierce thick hides and cause maximum hemorrhaging.
But here's where it gets really interesting and
honestly a little terrifying from a societal
standpoint. The history of these early mammoth
hunters is a master class in how fragile a specialized
existence can be. It truly is. Because our research
shows that this entire Paleolithic culture essentially
vanished. They just disappeared around 5000 BC,
and it wasn't an invading army that took them
out. No, it was an invisible enemy. Extreme climate
change and ecological collapse. Right. As the
Ice Age ended and the climate rapidly warmed,
the whole environment shifted. The grasslands
changed, the water sources moved, and the megafauna,
the mammoths, the giant sloths, they just went
extinct. So their entire food source literally
evaporated. Exactly. And what's fascinating here
is the brutal lesson in vulnerability. These
early inhabitants had built an entire culture,
an entire technology tree, and an entire social
structure calibrated perfectly to do one thing.
Hunt massive animals. Yes. So when the mammoths
died out, The culture built around hunting them
simply could not sustain itself. They were too
specialized. If your entire economy, your tool
making, your seasonal movements are tied to a
resource that suddenly ceases to exist. Your
society collapses. It's a stark early reminder
that the history of this land is defined by people
constantly being forced to adapt to harsh changing
realities. You either adapt your technology in
your diet or you disappear. Wow. So the mammoth
hunters fade into the archaeological record.
Fast forward a few millennia, the climate stabilizes
into something closer to what we recognize today.
And between the years AD 500 and 800, we see
a totally new cultural expression emerge in eastern
South Dakota. The historical records refer to
them as the mound builders. Right, and this is
a significant shift in how humans are interacting
with the landscape. These people live primarily
around the watershed of the Big Sioux River and
Big Stone Lake. There were still hunters and
gatherers living in temporary or maybe seasonal
villages, but they did something the earlier
mammoth hunters never did. They built something
permanent. Exactly. They left a permanent monumental
mark on the earth. They constructed these low,
massive earthen burial mounds. And what's the
significance of that? I mean, building a mound
requires moving tons of earth by hand, right?
Yes, entirely by hand. Without beasts of burden,
without metal shovels, that requires a surplus
of calories and a complex social hierarchy to
organize the labor. So they weren't just struggling
to survive day to day anymore. Precisely. If
we connect this to the bigger picture, a burial
mound is a declaration of presence. It's a way
of anchoring a nomadic or semi -nomadic people
to a specific geographic location. It's like
saying, we are here and our ancestors are here.
Yes. It represents a shared religious cosmology
and a huge communal effort. And many of these
mounds still exist today, just quietly sitting
in the landscape. But like the mammoth hunters,
the mound builders' time in the region was limited
too, right? It was. By the year 800, they met
their demise. The sources suggest it was likely
through a combination of assimilation into other
expanding groups or outright warfare. Which brings
us to another massive pivot point in the timeline.
Between 1250 and 1400, a new wave of people arrives
from the East. Yes. They settle in the central
part of the state, and they bring a technology
that completely alters the relationship between
humans and the Great Plains, agriculture. Right.
And our sources identify them as likely the ancestors
of the modern Mandan people of North Dakota.
And the introduction of agriculture changes all
the rules of the game. We are moving away from
pure hunter gatherers to societies that can actually
manipulate the earth to produce a predictable
caloric surplus. They're growing crops. They
are. And with agriculture comes permanent settlement.
You have to stay near your fields to tend and
harvest them, right? You can't just plant corn
and walk away for six months. Exactly. But with
permanent settlement and a surplus of stored
food, comes something else entirely, a target.
You suddenly have resources that need to be aggressively
defended. And this is where I really want to
push back on a narrative that is so prevalent
today. You know, there is this common modern
misconception. You see it in movies, in romanticized
popular culture, even in some classrooms. Oh,
absolutely. There's this idea that pre -Columbian
America was this sparsely populated, universally
peaceful Eden that before European contact, everyone
just lived in perfect tranquil harmony with nature
and each other. But the archaeological reality
completely shatters that myth. It does. The romanticized
version of history does a massive disservice
to the actual human drama. You know, the complex
geopolitics, the brutal realities of survival
that unfolded here. And there is perhaps no starker
evidence of this than what occurred in the year
1325 near present -day Chamberlain, South Dakota.
The Crow Creek Massacre. Yes. When you look at
the archaeological excavation of the site, it
is chilling. Our sources note they found 486
bodies buried in a massive mass grave. Right.
And this wasn't just a battlefield skirmish out
on the open plains. No. This mass grave was located
inside a complex, heavily engineered fortification.
They had built a massive defensive ditch and
a wooden palisade wall. A walled city, essentially.
And the skeletal remains. The forensic evidence
shows horrific trauma, including undeniable evidence
of systemic scalping and decapitation. It is
a profoundly grim archaeological site. but it
tells us volumes about the mechanical reality
of the 14th century Great Plains. Let's think
about the logistics of this for a second. Okay.
You don't expend the immense caloric energy required
to dig a massive trench and fill hundreds of
trees for a palisade wall unless you are deeply
terrified of your neighbors. Because digging
a trench with bone and stone tools is incredibly
hard work. Unbelievably hard. You build walls
because you have stored agricultural wealth.
Corn, beans, dried meat, and you know someone
else wants it. It makes me think of the rise
and fall of ancient walled city states in Mesopotamia.
You know, like Uruk or Babylon. That's a great
comparison. We always visualize the Plains as
this wide open free flowing space. But here you
have densely packed walled settlements, siege
warfare, mass casualties and brutal intimate
violence. It was a complex, highly populated
and fiercely contested landscape. We have to
ask why this massacre happened. Archaeological
evidence from the bones at Crow Creek prior to
the massacre shows signs of severe malnutrition.
Oh really? Yes. This suggests that the region
was experiencing a prolonged drought or climatic
downturn. When the crops fail and the bison herds
thin out, the carrying capacity of the land drops.
So people get desperate. Exactly. Suddenly those
stored reserves of food behind the palisade walls
become a matter of life and death. The Crow Creek
massacre wasn't senseless violence. It was a
devastating symptom of extreme resource scarcity
and high stakes competition for survival. Wow.
So out of this incredibly intense era of ancient
agriculturalists and walled, warring settlements,
we see the rise of complex, permanently settled
trading empires. Which brings us to section two
of our deep dive. And a group that completely
changes how I visualize the history of the Plains.
The Ardikara. Also known historically as the
Re. Our research notes, they began arriving in
the region from the south in the 16th century.
Okay. Linguistically, they spoke a Kidoan language,
which connects them to tribes like the Pawnee,
and suggests they originally migrated up from
what is now Kansas and Nebraska. And here is
the detail that just blew my mind. I'll admit
it. When I hear 16th century planes Indians,
my brain immediately defaults to the classic
Hollywood image. Yes. Horses. Yeah. Tapithas,
nomadic hunters following the buffalo herds,
entirely transient. But the historical record
explicitly states the Arkhar were not highly
nomadic. Far from it. They were masterful engineers
and urban planners of the planes. They lived
in permanent fortified villages. And these weren't
small temporary camps. They built massive circular
earthen lodges. Let's talk about those earth
lodges because the engineering is fascinating.
How exactly do you build a permanent home on
a prairie that experiences 100 degree summers
and negative 30 degree winters? It's a brilliant
adaptation to the extreme climate. They would
dig a shallow circular depression into the earth.
Like a basement. Exactly. Then they would erect
a heavy wooden framework, usually utilizing four
massive central posts. They would weave willow
branches through the outer framework and then
cover the entire immense dome with layers of
prairie sod and earth. So they basically built
man -made insulated caves. Yes. The thermal mass
of the earth meant that these lodges stayed incredibly
cool in the brutal summer heat. and retained
warmth from a central fire during the freezing
winters. That's so smart. Some of these lodges
were large enough to house dozens of people,
and even their most prized horses later on. And
these villages were strategically placed. They
were built on high bluffs overlooking the Missouri
River, and they were heavily enclosed by wooden
stockades. It's like a prehistoric Venice or
a Singapore of the Plains. I mean, think about
modern global supply chains. Singapore doesn't
produce everything itself, right? Right, it's
a hub. It sits on a crucial geographic choke
point and taxes and trades everything that flows
through it. That's exactly what the Arikara were
doing. They're sitting in these heavily fortified
permanent cities on the river bluffs. And they're
growing massive amounts of corn, beans, pumpkins
and squash. in the fertile river bottoms. But
their real power, their real geopolitical leverage
was trade. Exactly. They operated as the elite,
indispensable intermediaries of the continent.
If a hunting tribe from the northern plains had
excess bison roves or meat and wanted agricultural
products, they came to the Arikara. If a southern
tribe had distinct goods and wanted northern
flint or later European trade items, they came
to the Arikara. The Arikar essentially controlled
the flow of goods along the Missouri River corridor.
They remained stationary in their highly engineered
earth lodges while the wealth of the continent
literally walked to their front door. And their
political structure reflects that economic sophistication.
They weren't a rigid, top -down monarchy. The
research describes a semi -autonomous political
structure. So they weren't all answering to one
supreme king. No. Various sub -tribes and villages
were connected in a loose, flexible alliance.
This decentralized structure allowed them to
be incredibly nimble in trade negotiations and
local defense. And it was through these vast
continent -spanning trading connections that
one of the most transformative technologies in
human history reached the region. The horse.
Yes. The record suggests that the Arikara were
instrumental in the initial spread of the horse.
They acquired Spanish horses, which had been
moving steadily north through tribal trade networks
from Mexico and the American Southwest. And they
brought them to the South Dakota region around
1760. By the 17th century, the Arakara were at
the absolute peak of their power. They had as
many as 32 of these massive fortified villages.
They were an absolute powerhouse dictating the
terms of trade for hundreds of miles in every
direction. They were untouchable. But then comes
the fall. And it is swift and it is devastating.
By the late 18th century, those 32 thriving villages
had dropped to just two. It's a staggering collapse.
And eventually their numbers were so depleted
that they had to abandon their independence and
merge entirely with the Mandan to the north just
to survive. This steep collapse perfectly highlights
the absolute fragility of empire and the double
-edged sword of their lifestyle. The Arikara
had everything going for them. Fortifications,
agriculture, monopolies. Right. They had impenetrable
fortifications against traditional weapons. They
had sustainable high yield agriculture and they
had a virtual monopoly on regional trade. But
they were decimated by microscopic invaders.
Disease. The European pathogens that swept across
the continent. Specifically smallpox and cholera.
And here is where we need to look at the mechanics
of why it hit them so hard. A massive wooden
fortress can easily keep out a rival war party.
but it cannot keep out a virus. Obviously not.
When a pathogen enters a dense permanently settled
village where people are living in close quarters
inside earth lodges, the transmission rate is
catastrophic. Because everyone is trapped inside
together. Yes. In a dense population, a disease
burns through the community like a wildfire.
It is far more devastating to them than it is
to a widely dispersed nomadic group that travels
in small bands in the open air. So their greatest
strength Their permanent concentrator populations
and their position as a central hub where everyone
came to trade actually became their greatest
vulnerability. Every time a new trading party
arrived, they risked importing a plague. Exactly.
Disease, combined with relentless military pressure
from newly armed, expanding nomadic tribes who
were less impacted by the plagues, broke the
Arikara empire. Now our research also brings
up the sister tribe of the Arikara, the Pawnee,
who likely inhabited a small portion of land
in what is now the state. And there is a very
specific historical detail recorded in the documentation
about their cultural practices that is important
to discuss objectively based on the source text.
The historical records state that the Pawnee,
along with the Arikara, engaged in a yearly religious
ritual that involved human sacrifice. Yes. Based
purely on the historical documentation we are
analyzing, this was a deeply ingrained annual
religious practice. It was tied closely to their
agricultural cycle, specifically regarding the
Morning Star and the cultivation of corn. And
historical texts make a very specific note about
the United States government's reaction to this
practice as American influence began to creep
westward. Right. The government worked actively
to halt this ritual long before the Pawnee and
Arakara homelands came to be heavily settled
by white pioneers. And the reasoning provided
in the text is purely logistical and optics driven.
It wasn't framed as a moral crusade in these
documents. No. The government feared that if
the general public back east heard about the
practice of human sacrifice, they might react
with horror and refuse to move westward to settle
the newly acquired territories. It is a profound,
unvarnished collision of realities. recorded
in the text is not just a moral debate, it is
a clash of fundamental paradigms. Okay, break
that down. On one side, you have a deeply entrenched
religious cosmology of a Kidoan -speaking indigenous
nation, where this ritual is viewed as essential
for the survival of the cosmos and the success
of the harvest. Right, it's existential for them.
Exactly. On the other side, you have the calculated
westward expansion strategies and public relations
concerns of the 19th century United States government.
The practices of the Pawnee were viewed by the
expanding American government not just as alien,
but as a direct logistical impediment to the
project of mass white settlement. It's laid out
in the research as a stork historical mechanism,
right? The power of an expanding nation state
suppressing the fundamental religious ritual
of an indigenous society driven heavily by the
logistics and PR of colonization. That's exactly
what the text outlines. And while the Arakara
and Pawnee are dealing with these massive shifts,
diseases, and external pressures, the documents
remind us that the landscape was incredibly diverse.
The text mentions the Iowa or Iowa people and
their sister nation, the Oto. Yes, they inhabited
the borderland region where modern South Dakota,
Minnesota and Iowa meet just north of the Missouri
River. And the linguistic detail here is the
key that unlocks the next chapter of our story.
It really is. The research notes that the Iowa
and Oto spoke. Chewer. Chewer. Yes. This is a
very old, distinct variation of the Siouan language
family. It's linguistically tied to the ancestors
of the Ho -Chunk people of Wisconsin. Which perfectly
sets the stage for section three of our deep
dive. Because while the Arikar trade empire is
buckling under the weight of disease and shifting
trade routes on the plains, an entirely different
group of people is being violently forced out
of the dense eastern woodlands. Setting off a
massive chain reaction. Exactly. And this migration
is going to set off a geopolitical chain reaction
that completely rewrites the history, the culture
and the map of the North American continent.
We're talking about the genesis, the rapid evolution,
and the explosive rise of the Sioux. By the 17th
century, the historical texts tell us the Sioux,
who, as their name suggests, spoke a language
of the Siouan family, were deeply settled in
what is today central and northern Minnesota.
Right, way further east than most people picture
them. Yeah. They were Woodlands people, divided
into two primary culture groups at this time,
the Dakota and the Nakota. They harvested wild
rice. They hunted deer in the forests. They navigated
the lakes and canoes. A completely different
lifestyle. But by the early 18th century, something
massive shifts. They begin moving south and west,
abandoning the deep woodlands and spilling out
onto the open plains. And we have to analyze
the mechanics of why an entire civilization abandons
its ancestral homeland. This wasn't a casual
exploratory migration. People don't just pack
up and leave for no reason. Exactly. The sources
point to two main drivers. First, there was the
pull factor, greater food availability to the
West, specifically the vast unimaginable herds
of bison. But there's a push factor too, right?
Yes, and the push factor is much more urgent
and violent. They were facing a severe existential
military disadvantage. Okay, here's where it
gets really interesting and where the popular
narrative gets completely inverted. Are the sources
saying that the legendary, nomadic, fiercely
independent horse culture of the Plains Sioux,
the culture that becomes the absolute archetype
of the American West, was actually born because
they were refugees fleeing a technological arms
race in the Great Lakes? That is precisely what
the historical record indicates. It was an arms
race fueled by global colonial economics. Wow.
The rival Ojibwe and other related Algonquian
tribes living to the east of the Sioux had established
lucrative direct trade relations with the French
Empire. The fur trade. Right. And through that
fur trade, the Algonquian tribes obtained European
firearms, muskets, and rifles. The Sioux, who
were further inland and lacked that direct trade
access, were still entirely reliant on traditional
bows, arrows, and clubs. Let's break down that
tactical disadvantage. In the dense, heavily
wooded environment of northern Minnesota, an
ambush with early firearms is devastating. It
changes everything. The noise, the smoke, the
sheer kinetic impact of a lead ball compared
to an arrow, it completely changes the math of
woodland warfare. The research mentions a poorly
understood but highly disruptive and violent
conflict between Suan and Algonquian peoples
in the early 18th century. The Sioux were quite
literally outgunned, they couldn't hold their
territory against musket fire, and it forced
a massive tactical retreat westward. And what
happens next is a testament to human resilience
and ingenuity. They move west into the prairies,
and it fundamentally entirely alters their civilization.
It's a complete 180. They go from being a largely
settled eastern woodlands people, navigating
lakes and canoes, to becoming the apex nomadic
civilization of the northern plains. The speed
and totality of this transformation is staggering
to think about. Let's look at the mechanical
characteristics of this adaptation that our sources
outline. First, their diet and economy completely
shift to a near total dependence on the bison.
The bison provided not just meat, but bone for
tools, sinew for bowstrings, stomachs for water
vessels, and hides for clothing and shelter.
A walking supermarket, essentially. Second, and
most crucially, they undergo an equestrian revolution.
They adopt the horse. And remarkably, the text
notes, they were introduced to the horse by the
Cheyenne tribe. And mastering the horse is not
a simple task. You are taking a - people who
have walked or paddled for thousands of years,
and suddenly they have to learn to breed, train,
ride, and fight from the back of a massive flight
-oriented prey animal. It's a completely alien
skill set. It really is. But the horse exponentially
expanded their hunting radius. A hunter on foot
might track a herd for days to get a single kill.
A hunter on horseback can ride alongside a stampeding
herd and kill multiple bison in minutes. It created
an incredible caloric surplus. And the third
massive adaptation is architectural. The adoption
of the tippy. You know, we tend to look at the
tippy just as a tent, a simple piece of fabric
on some sticks. Right, a very reductive view.
But when you examine it through the lens of this
rapid societal adaptation, the tippy is a highly
advanced, flawlessly engineered piece of survival
technology. Let's analyze the engineering of
a tippy. They left behind their semi -permanent
heavy woodland lodges for something completely
aerodynamic. Because there's no windbreaks on
the plains. Exactly. The conical shape of a tippy
is specifically designed to shed the brutal 60
mile an hour straight -line winds of the Great
Plains without collapsing. And it solves the
temperature problem, too. They have adjustable
smoke flaps at the top, which create a draft,
allowing you to have a safe, open fire inside
the shelter during a blizzard without suffocating
from the smoke. Exactly. And it is hypermobile.
A tippy could be disassembled by the women of
the tribe in a matter of minutes. Wow, minutes.
Yes. The log pole strapped to the sides of a
horse to create a drag sled called a trevoy,
and the entire village could be on the move,
chasing a migrating bison herd before the morning
was over. That's incredible. It is a master class
in societal adaptation. In a remarkably short
window of time, just a few generations, the Sioux
changed their geographic environment, their primary
food source, their mode of transportation, their
architecture, and their military tactics. They
weaponized mobility. That's a brilliant way to
phrase it. They weaponized mobility. The very
thing that forced them out of Minnesota being
outmaneuvered and outgunned by rifle -wielding
rivals in a static environment turned them into
the undisputed masters of the Great Plains. Once
they had horses in the open prairie, traditional
infantry tactics were useless against them. They
grew so powerful that population boomed so much
from the bison surplus and their territory expanded
so rapidly that the original group actually fractured.
The text describes a massive societal schism
once they were established on the plains. Yes.
The vast distances and differing local ecologies
caused the original unified groups to divide
into three separate distinct nations. OK, let's
break those down. You have the Lakota. who pushed
the furthest west. They crossed the massive barrier
of the Missouri River around 1760 and reached
the Black Hills by 1776, establishing dominance
over western South Dakota, northwestern Nebraska,
and southwestern North Dakota. Then you have
the Assiniboine. Interestingly, their path diverged
completely. They actually migrated back eastward
toward their ancestral homelands in Minnesota.
And then you have the remaining Sioux in the
central regions. The text notes that around this
time, the Dakota people rose to become politically
and culturally more prominent than the Nakota,
to the point where the entirety of this central
group largely adopted the Dakota identity. And
we most deeply emphasize the geopolitical ripple
effect of this massive Sioux expansion. History
is physics, for every action there is a reaction.
The Sioux weren't migrating into a vacuum. The
text clearly states that due to the sheer kinetic
force of the Sioux migrations, a number of other
established tribes were violently displaced from
the region. It's a domino effect, though. Djibwe
pushed the Sioux, the Sioux pushed everyone else.
Exactly. The Cheyenne, who... in a bitter irony
of history, have been the ones to introduce the
Lakota to the horse in the first place, were
completely pushed out of their territory and
driven further west. Well, that is ironic. The
Arikara, already weakened by smallpox, were forced
to abandon their southern outposts and retreat
further north along the Missouri River. And the
Omaha tribe was driven completely out of southeastern
South Dakota, forced southward into northeastern
Nebraska. But the story of the Sioux doesn't
end in fragmentation. They divide. They conquer.
But then they evolved politically. Right. The
text notes that later on, the Lakota and the
Assiniboine returned to the diplomatic fold.
They reunited with the Dakota to form a single,
massive, incredibly complex political confederacy
known as the Asceti Sakowin or the Seven Council
Fires. To understand the Asceti Sakowin, you
have to discard the European idea of a centralized
nation state with a single king and a capital
city. It wasn't an empire in the Roman sense.
No, this was a highly sophisticated. decentralized
political confederacy designed for a nomadic
civilization. It was culturally divided into
four main groups, the Lakota, the Dakota, the
Nakoda, and the Nagoda. And within those, there
were subdivisions, right? Yes. Within those broader
cultural umbrellas, there were seven distinct
autonomous tribes, each operating under their
own chiefs and internal councils. The sources
list them out specifically. We have the Wapitan,
the Dakota Santee, and the Sisseton, the Nagoda
Yankton and Yanktoni, and the massive Lakota
Teton. And right here, buried in the demographic
breakdown, there is an incredibly deep nerdy
linguistic detail in the text about the Nakoda
tribe that I just have to talk about. Oh, the
translation error. Yes. Because it perfectly
illustrates how fragile historical memory is.
If you look in many standard history books, you
will see the Nakoda of this region referred to
as the Nakoda Mdawakan. But the source text points
out that this name is actually a massive historical
hallucination. Yes. stems from a fundamental
error in early European attempts to transcribe
the spoken Lakota language into a written alphabet.
Right. The text explains the mechanics of the
mistake. Early translators and missionaries struggling
to capture sounds that didn't exist in English
or French mistakenly transcribed the Lakota bilial
sound as an MD. It seems like a tiny phonetic
slip, but the ripple effects are huge. Right.
Because once it's written down, it becomes fact.
Exactly. For example, the Lakota word for summer
is blokektu. Because of this transcription error,
it was widely misprinted in dictionaries and
texts as maketu. And because of this widespread
systemic translation error, the tribal name Mdewaken
is actually a complete misprint that just stuck.
The historical text states that, properly, based
on their own linguistic pronunciation, they should
be known as the Bloewaken. It's a striking, almost
sobering reminder of how history is literally
shaped by the people holding the pen. Literally
a typo. A simple phonetic misunderstanding by
a sweaty, confused, 18th century European translator
gets cemented into the permanent historical record,
and generations of people end up calling a tribe
by a name that is essentially a typo. It raises
a vital question for anyone studying history.
What else has been skewed, simplified, or entirely
erased in translation? That's a scary thought.
But if we pull back and connect this linguistic
nuance to the bigger picture, the Usseti Sagwin,
The Seven Council Fires, was an incredibly effective
continent -spanning geopolitical entity. In this
unified form, The text notes, they were powerful
enough to eventually secure from the United States
government a legally recognized sovereign homeland.
Which was called the Minnesota Makoche or the
Lakota Republic. Yes, they weren't just a collection
of roaming bands. They were a bona fide superpower.
They were dictating the movement of other nations,
controlling thousands of square miles of territory,
regulating the immense wealth of the Buffalo
Plains. They functioned as a sovereign power,
fully capable of forcing the United States to
the negotiating table. Which perfectly sets the
for Section 5, the inevitable clash of expanding
nations. As we cross into the early 19th century,
the geopolitical board changes overnight. In
1803, the United States, under President Thomas
Jefferson, executes the Louisiana Purchase. Buying
a massive tract of land from Napoleon Bonaparte
for $11 million. Which is an incredibly arrogant
transaction when you think about it. two men
in Paris and Washington exchanging money for
land that neither of them have ever seen. And
that is currently occupied and controlled by
the most powerful military confederacy on the
continent. Exactly. The U .S. essentially buys
a piece of paper, but they have absolutely no
idea what is actually out there. So Jefferson
organizes the Lewis and Clark expedition, the
Corps of Discovery, to launch in 1804 and figure
out exactly what they just bought. Their mission,
according to the official parameters recorded
in the text, was multifaceted. They were to follow
the Missouri River to its source, find a navigable
water route to the Pacific Ocean, take extensive
cartographic and scientific surveys of the flora
and fauna. and crucially established diplomatic
and trade relations with the indigenous tribes
they encountered. Right. They left St. Louis
in May of 1804 with a heavily armed contingent
of 45 men and 15 tons of supplies loaded into
three boats. And they were just slowly fighting
the fierce current of the Missouri until they
reached the South Dakota region in late August.
And the sources provide some incredible, very
human details from this leg of the journey. For
instance, near present -day Vermillion, South
Dakota, Lewis and Clark actually anchored their
boats and hiked inland to a specific geological
formation called Spirit Mound. Why? Because they
had heard local indigenous folklore that the
mound was inhabited by aggressive little spirits
or devils armed with tiny arrows. That's fascinating.
It shows that they weren't just mapping rivers.
They were trying to navigate and catalog the
mythic and spiritual geography of the plains
just as much as the physical terrain. And their
physical diplomatic encounters were equally varied
and complex. The text documents that they had
a very peaceful, highly ceremonial meeting with
the Yankton Sioux further south. Gifts were exchanged,
speeches were made, and it fit the neat narrative
of peaceful diplomacy. But then they went further
north. Yes. However, as they pushed further north
up the river, their encounter with the heavily
armed Lakota Sioux was an entirely different
story. It was incredibly tense, volatile, and
nearly ended the expedition right then and there.
And this is exactly where I want to push back
on how standard American history usually frames
this event. If you read a standard middle school
textbook, Lewis and Clark are presented as the
main characters of the continent. Always. They
are boldly and bravely discovering an open wilderness.
But reading this source text, a completely different,
much more realistic picture emerges. Through
the eyes of the Lakota, Lewis and Clark weren't
heroic explorers. No, not at all. They look like
a small, poorly manned, peculiar group of unauthorized
traitors trying to sneak through the heavily
controlled borders of a massive empire without
paying the toll. That is the most accurate geopolitical
reading of the situation. The Lakota were the
dominant power, the Missouri River was their
highway, and they controlled who moved on it.
So they weren't just randomly unpacking them.
The text explicitly states that the Lakota initially
mistook the American party simply for another
group of traders. They viewed the expedition
entirely through an economic and regulatory lens.
They demanded tribute for passing through sovereign
Lakota waters. Let's paint the picture of this
standoff. It happens in late September near the
mouth of the Bad River. The language barrier
is massive. They're trying to communicate through
a chain of inadequate translators. Which just
breeds paranoia. Right. Tensions skyrocket. At
one point, the Lakota warriors physically seize
the mooring cable of the American boat and steal
a horse. Lewis, furious and panicking, orders
his men to man the swivel guns on the boats and
prepare to fire. The Lakota warriors string their
bows and draw their arrows. You have this incredibly
fraught standoff on the muddy banks of the Missouri.
It appeared the Lakota were fully prepared to
violently delay or completely halt the expedition.
It was a knife's edge moment. But ultimately,
through intense last -minute diplomacy by a Lakota
chief named Black Buffalo, the weapons were lowered.
They stood down and eventually allowed the Americans
to pass. But the takeaway is crucial. It wasn't
random savage hostility. It was border control.
You have a superpower, the Sioux Confederacy,
encountering uninvited, heavily armed foreign
agents moving up their most vital economic waterway.
The Corps of Discovery didn't boldly march through
an empty wilderness. They had to walk an incredibly
delicate diplomatic tightrope through foreign
territory. Exactly. And the sources point out
that Lewis and Clark were constantly mediating
regional politics as they moved. The text notes
that, further north, the expedition actively
acted as diplomatic mediators between the Warring
Arikara and Mandan tribes. They were trying to
establish an American brokered peace to facilitate
future trade. Lewis and Clark were stepping into
a deeply complex, pre -existing geopolitical
web that had been spinning for centuries. But
the mutual recognition of these tribal borders,
and later formal treaties recognizing entities
like the Lakota Republic, would ultimately buckle.
Which brings us to Section 6. Right. As we move
into Section 6 of our deep dive, the 19th century
grinds on, and the feared demographic and industrial
weight of American westward expansion becomes
an overwhelming, unstoppable force. The sources
outline a tragic, systematic, and entirely predictable
dissolution of every agreement made between the
United States and the Sioux. In the decades leading
up to the Civil War, the pressure valve bursts.
Steamboats are coming up the river. Wagon trains
are cutting across the hunting grounds. Conflicts
inevitably increased between the fiercely protective
Sioux and the encroaching American citizens.
And the text points the finger squarely at a
severely poorly funded, disorganized, and corrupt
Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was fundamentally
incapable of honoring its obligations or keeping
the peace. The logistics of the treaties were
flawed from the start. The US government made
promises of rations and border enforcement that
it either couldn't or wouldn't keep. As starvation
set in and patience wore thin, violence erupted.
Eventually, utilizing the outbreak of violence
as justification, the United States blamed the
Sioux for various atrocities against settlers.
And unilaterally rendered the treaties recognizing
the sovereign nation of Lakota completely null
and void. It initiates a relentless cascade of
shrinking boundaries. In 1858, under immense
political and military pressure, the Yankton
Sioux are forced to sign the Treaty of Washington.
And what did that do? This document legally sieged
the vast majority of present -day eastern South
Dakota to the United States government. And the
moment the ink is dry, land speculators, railroad
tycoons, and pioneers immediately rush in to
claim the best riverfront property. They found
early colonial cities like Sioux Falls and Yankton.
The eastern half of the state was gone, but the
western half of present -day South Dakota was
a different story, at least temporarily. Right,
because of another treaty. The text states that
the subsequent Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868
had formally granted this massive Western area,
including the spiritually and economically vital
Black Hills to the Sioux as part of the Great
Sioux Reservation. The treaty explicitly stated
that the land was theirs in perpetuity and that
no white persons would be permitted to settle
or pass through without permission. In perpetuity
until 1874. That is the flashpoint. That's when
the U .S. government, dealing with a severe economic
depression and hungry for capital, authorizes
General George A. Custer to lead a heavily armed
military expedition straight into the heart of
the Black Hills. Which, again, the text firmly
notes was strictly treaty protected land granted
to the Sioux. Custer's men discover gold. And
once the word gold hits the telegraph wires,
the treaty is effectively dead. The mechanics
of a gold rush destroy borders instantly. The
text is very clear on the sequence of legal and
physical events here. The US government initially
attempted to purchase the Black Hills. But the
Sioux said no. The Sioux, viewing the land as
sacred and non -negotiable, adamantly declined
to grant mining rights or sell the land. So legally,
the US was obligated by the Treaty of Fort Laramie
to forcefully remove any American citizens trespassing
on the reservation. But practically, the military
largely failed. or refused, to stop the massive
flood of heavily armed white miners, prospectors
and settlers from illegally pouring into the
region. I mean, how do you stop 10 ,000 desperate
men with pickaxes? You don't. And according to
the historical documents we are reviewing, this
blatant failure by the United States to uphold
its own treaty borders directly inevitably led
to the outbreak of the Great Sioux War of 1876.
This is the war that includes the famous Battle
of the Little Bighorn, where Custer is killed.
But despite that tactical victory for the Sioux,
the strategic reality of the war was devastating.
The result was the total military defeat of the
Sioux Confederacy and their forced placement
onto drastically reduced, strictly controlled
reservations within South Dakota and North Dakota.
And the political pressure for land didn't stop
once they were confined to the reservations.
It only intensified. The research highlights
a specific event in 1889. OK, what happened then?
President Benjamin Harrison sent General George
Crook with a federal commission to persuade the
Sioux to sell off fully half of their remaining
reservation land. Because the driving political
belief in Washington was that the newly minted
state of South Dakota wouldn't be economically
viable or attractive to immigrants unless it
controlled that land. Exactly. And the text uses
a very specific loaded phrase here to describe
how General Crook managed to get the Sioux to
sign away millions of acres. of their last remaining
territory. It states and I quote that he used
dubious methods. to secure the agreement. Okay,
to unpack what dubious methods means in the context
of late 19th century Indian affairs, it generally
involved exploiting the desperation of the tribes.
It meant bypassing recognized tribal leaders
to find individuals willing to sign, forging
signatures, making impossible promises. And most
coercively, threatening to withhold life -saving
federal food rations from a starting population
unless they agreed to the land sessions. It was
bureaucratic extortion. which brings the historical
timeline to its darkest, most tragic point, December
29, 1890, and the Wounded Knee Massacre on the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The text notes
this was the last major armed conflict between
the United States and the Sioux Nation. It is
essential to recount the facts of Wounded Knee
exactly as they are documented, without embellishment,
because the reality is horrifying enough on its
own. The U .S. Seventh Cavalry had intercepted
a band of mini -Konju Lakota under Chief Spotted
Elk. The military's objective was to disarm the
Lakota and move them to a different camp. During
the tense process of confiscating weapons, a
rifle discharged. And the response from the U
.S. troops who had surrounded the camp with rapid
-fire Hotchkiss mountain guns was overwhelming
and indiscriminate. The numbers recorded in the
text are devastating. The massacre resulted in
the deaths of approximately 300 Sioux. And the
demographic breakdown is the most chilling part.
A vast number of the dead were unarmed women
and children who were fleeing the camp. In the
ensuing chaos and crossfire, 25 US soldiers were
also killed. It is the stark, brutal culmination
of decades of broken treaties, cultural suppression,
and an insatiable American appetite for land.
But the historical documents we are reviewing
today don't just end the story in the blood and
snow of 1890. They trace this profound legal
and moral conflict directly into the modern era.
Yes. The text notes that the Sioux never stopped
fighting for their rights to the Black Hills.
They just moved the battlefield to the American
court system. Right. And after nearly a century
of stalled litigation and failed lawsuits, a
landmark decision is reached. Tell us about that.
The text states that in the 1980s, specifically
the 1980 Supreme Court case, United States v.
Sioux Nation of Indians, the highest court in
the land officially recognized and ruled that
the United States government was entirely at
fault. The court ruled that the taking of the
Black Hills was illegal and violated the Fifth
Amendment. Stating essentially that a more ripe
and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never
in all probability be found in our history. So
if we step back and ask, what does this all mean
for us today? It means that the legal frameworks
drafted in the 1860s and 1870s, the Treaty of
Fort Laramie, the illegal Custer expedition,
the dubious methods of General Crooke, they are
not just dusty history. They are the active,
unresolved legal and social realities of the
20th and 21st centuries. The Supreme Court awarded
the Sioux over $100 million in compensation for
the stolen land, but the Sioux refused to take
the money, arguing that accepting the payout
would legally validate the theft of their sacred
homeland. And the text explicitly concludes this
deeply complex section by noting that despite
the Supreme Court officially recognizing the
government's fault and illegal actions, very
little has actually been done practically or
politically to smooth the issue over to the best
interests of both sides. The Black Hills remain
heavily populated and heavily mined, and the
Sioux remain on the reservations. The legal victory
exists on paper. But the physical reality of
the landscape remains unchanged. It is a profound,
lingering stalemate. It really is incredible.
When you look at it all laid out, when you take
the time to really examine the mechanics of how
we got here, the journey for you, the listener,
today has been massive. We started 17 ,000 years
ago, standing on a freezing glacier, watching
early humans track giant megafauna across the
Ice Age Plains. We saw the engineering marvels
and the rapid collapse of the Arikara trade empires.
fortified in their earth lodges. We tracked the
breathtaking lightning -fast transformation of
the Sioux pushed out of the eastern woodlands
by European rifles, mastering the horse, engineering
the tippy, and rising to absolutely dominate
the Great Plains. We watched Lewis and Clark
navigate the tense borders of a sovereign indigenous
superpower. And finally, we trace the tragic,
complex, legally fraught physical conflicts over
the Black Hills that continue to echo loudly
in the Supreme Court and on the reservations
today. It is a history defined by one constant,
relentless, unforgiving change. The environment
changes, the technology changes, the balance
of power changes. And reviewing this epic sweep
of human adaptation leaves me with a final thought.
a perspective based entirely on the sources we've
examined today. What's that? If a single landscape
can completely change hands, shift cultures,
adopt new technologies, and speak different languages
so many times over the course of 17 ,000 years,
what does that mean for our modern maps? Oh,
wow. We tend to view the borders drawn today,
the states, and the nations as permanent ink.
We look at the straight, clean lines of South
Dakota on a globe and think they are eternal.
But the deep history of the Great Plains suggests
that those borders are far more fragile. They
are less like permanent ink and more like lines
drawn in the sand just waiting for the wind to
blow. Wow. Lines in the sand. That completely
changes how I look at a map and how I understand
the ground I'm standing on. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive into these incredible
historical sources, keep questioning the neat
narratives, keep looking past the binary, and
always stay curious.