Plains Indians: How the Railroads Ended their Way of Life

By Patrick Allitt, Emory University

The technological disparity between the Plains Indians and the whites was so immense that the coming of settlers, with the railroads, made continuation of the Indians’ independent life impossible. In the 1870s, the whites hunted almost to extinction the buffalo herds on which the Indians lived, partly for food and hides, and partly as a way of undermining the Indians’ livelihood.

Plains Indians and the Whites

White settlers’ eagerness for land made treaties hard to enforce, especially when news of gold discoveries in treaty lands like the Black Hills of South Dakota set off new gold rushes.

The Plains Indians tribes of the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and others were warrior societies that lived to fight. They were briefly able to settle their differences to win a single victory against General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, but that was the last victory of the kind that was ever won by a group of the Indians. In reaction, the U.S. Army intensified its campaign against them, and broke all resistance within a year.

After that, it was only isolated campaigns such as that against the Apache chief Geronimo in 1886, which disturbed the peace of the American West. Indian reservation policy, intended by the government as a temporary expedient until the Indians were assimilated into society, actually began a permanent feature of the American West right up to the present, something which hadn’t been foreseen.

This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Whites Introduce Horses

The life of the Plains Indians, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and many others started to be influenced by the whites even before they ever encountered them.

For example, the arrival of horses in the New World transformed the way of life of the Plains Indians. There were no horses in America until Columbus and the conquistadors’ generations. Because they had no fences, horses began to escape and to breed very, very rapidly, so that great wild horse herds spread into the interior of both North and South America.

Gradual Transformation

Two hundred years before they ever met white men face to face, groups of the Indians living on the American Great Plains, began to encounter feral horses, and to domesticate and ride them. That in itself transformed their way of life.

First, it made their diet more carnivorous, because they were now able to hunt the buffalo on horseback, which gave them a far better opportunity of bringing them down than they’d had when they hunted them only on foot.

It also meant that they came into contact with each other more often, because they had so much more mobility, which in turn tended to make them more war-like. That means that already before their encounters with the whites, their way of life was changing because of something the whites had brought into America.

Dependent on the Whites

In fact, many of the Plains Indians groups had been almost entirely annihilated by diseases brought by the whites. Very often, the arrival of the whites brought smallpox, measles, and other illnesses to which they had no immunity, and this would wipe out tribes completely.

The Plains Indians were very eager to get hold of guns from the whites as soon as they met them, because if one had a gun, it gave them a terrific advantage in tribal warfare against rival groups. But, of course, although they could use the guns, and they could fire them, they couldn’t repair them, and they couldn’t make their own ammunition.

So, once they got guns, they were brought into a trading relationship with the whites. It, thus, gave them a decisive advantage over their enemies, but made them dependent on the whites, even though periodically they were at war with the whites.

Meeting the Whites

The Oregon Trail across the continent opened up in the 1840s, and so for the first time, the Plains Indians began to meet not just isolated explorers and fur trappers, as had been the case for the preceding 30 or 40 years, but large numbers of settlers, and they were absolutely astonished by how many of them there were.

The Plains Indians themselves lived in small communities—small, isolated hunting bands—and to see literally thousands of people crossing the Great Plains in these wagon trains was something of which they had had no prior experience.

The Indian villagers would sometimes go into Fort Laramie and demand a feast from the pioneers; that is, they’d demand a cup of coffee and some biscuits, simple things that the settlers were bringing but of which they’d had no prior experience. The settlers themselves, who were used to farming back in the Missouri and Illinois woods, were terrified to encounter these what to them seemed like savage madmen out on the Plains.

There was therefore a short-term temporary advantage to the Indians, who could be very war-like and threatening, but in the long term everything was stacked against them, making the end of their way of life almost inevitable. Disease, technological discrepancy, sheer numbers, and power; all these things were against them.

Common Questions about the Plains Indians

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