Original American contact , 1832–33. The first peoples (
Paleo-Indians) arrived on the Great Plains thousands of years ago. The introduction of corn around 800 CE allowed the development of the mound-building
Mississippian culture along rivers that crossed the Great Plains and that included trade networks west to the Rocky Mountains. Mississippians settled the Great Plains at sites now in
Oklahoma and
South Dakota.
Siouan language speakers may have originated in the lower
Mississippi River region. They were agriculturalists and may have been part of the
Mound Builder civilization during the 9th–12th centuries. Pressure from other Indian tribes, themselves driven west and south by the encroachment of European settlers as well as economic incentives such as the fur trade, alongside the arrival of the horse and firearms from Europe pushed multiple tribes onto the Great Plains. Among those to have lived on the Great Plains were the
Blackfoot,
Crow,
Sioux,
Cheyenne,
Arapaho,
Comanche, and others. Eastern portions of the Great Plains were inhabited by tribes who lived at
Etzanoa and in semi-permanent villages of earth lodges, such as the
Arikara,
Mandan,
Pawnee, and
Wichita. Wars with the
Ojibwe and
Cree peoples pushed the
Lakota (Teton Sioux) west onto the Great Plains in the mid- to late-17th century. The
Shoshone originated in the western
Great Basin and spread north and east into present-day
Idaho and Wyoming. By 1500, some Eastern Shoshone had crossed the
Rocky Mountains into the Great Plains. After 1750, warfare and pressure from the Blackfoot, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho pushed Eastern Shoshone south and westward. Some of them moved as far south as Texas, emerging as the
Comanche by 1700.
Arrival of horses , George Catlin, c. 1846 The first known contact between Europeans and Indians in the Great Plains occurred in what is now Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska from 1540 to 1542 with the arrival of
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a Spanish conquistador. In that same period,
Hernando de Soto crossed a west-northwest direction in what is now Oklahoma and Texas which is now known as the De Soto Trail. The Spanish thought that the Great Plains were the location of the mythological
Quivira and Cíbola, a place said to be rich in gold. People in the southwest began to acquire horses in the 16th century by trading or stealing them from Spanish colonists in New Mexico. As horse culture moved northward, the Comanche were among the first to commit to a fully mounted
nomadic lifestyle. This occurred by the 1730s, when they had acquired enough horses to put all their people on horseback. The real beginning of the horse culture of the plains began with the
Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico and the capture of thousands of horses and other livestock. In 1683 a Spanish expedition into Texas found horses among Native people. In 1690, a few horses were found by the Spanish among the Indians living at the mouth of the
Colorado River of Texas and the
Caddo of eastern Texas had a sizeable number. The French explorer
Claude Charles Du Tisne found 300 horses among the
Wichita on the
Verdigris River in 1719, but they were still not plentiful. Another Frenchman,
Bourgmont, could only buy seven at a high price from the
Kaw in 1724, indicating that horses were still scarce among tribes in
Kansas. By 1770, that Plains Indians culture was mature, consisting of mounted buffalo-hunting nomads from Saskatchewan and
Alberta southward nearly to the
Rio Grande. is a portrayal of Plains Indians chasing buffalo over a small cliff. The Walters Art Museum. The milder winters of the southern Plains favored a pastoral economy by the Indians. On the northeastern Plains of Canada, the Indians were less favored, with families owning fewer horses, remaining more dependent upon dogs for transporting goods, and hunting bison on foot. The scarcity of horses in the north encouraged raiding and warfare in competition for the relatively small number of horses that survived the severe winters. Comanche power peaked in the 1840s when they conducted
large-scale raids hundreds of miles into Mexico proper, while also
warring against the Anglo-Americans and
Tejanos who had settled in
independent Texas.
Fur trade The
fur trade brought thousands of colonial settlers into the Great Plains over the next 100 years. Fur trappers made their way across much of the region, making regular contacts with Indians. The
Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) had first been granted in 1670 a commercial monopoly over the huge
Hudson Bay drainage area known as
Rupert's Land covering a northern portion of the Great Plains. The
North West Company fur trade incumbent had also been present in the area until acquired by the HBC during the early 1820s. The United States acquired the
Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and conducted the
Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804–1806, and more information became available concerning the Plains, and various pioneers entered the areas. Fur trading posts were often the basis of later settlements. Through the 19th century, more settlers migrated to the Great Plains as part of a vast
westward expansion of population, and new settlements became dotted across the Great Plains. The settlers also brought diseases against which the Indians had no resistance. Between a half and two-thirds of the Plains Indians are thought to have died of
smallpox by the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The
1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic spread across the Great Plains, killing many thousands between 1837 and 1840. In the end, it is estimated that two-thirds of the Blackfoot population died, along with half of the
Assiniboines and Arikaras, a third of the Crows, and a quarter of the Pawnees. ==Cattle ranching and homesteads==