Samuel Western Published: April 26, 2016 https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/trade-among-tribes-commerce-plains-europeans-arrived
In the spring of 1934, an aging cowboy and stockman wrote some recollections to the editor of the Lusk Free Lance, a newspaper then published in Niobrara County in eastern  Wyoming . In his letter, Addison A. Spaugh detailed his extensive life in the Wyoming  cattle business , including a discovery he made in 1880 while driving cattle up the Muddy River drainage in the foothills of the Laramie Range.
“It was on this trip up the Muddy I discovered the Spanish Diggings. Thinking I had discovered a Spanish gold mine, I reported the fact to Mr. Manville [Hiram S. Manville, co-owner of the Converse Cattle Company] and he reported it to Adams and Glover, two drug store men in  Cheyenne  …”
The name, Spanish Diggings, stuck. Assumptions about its origins did not. Archeologists and geologists were the first to call Spaugh’s assumptions into question. In 1894, University of Wyoming Geology Professor Wilbur C. Knight examined the quarries and estimated that “aborigines” excavated “hundreds of thousands if not millions of tons,” of quartzite.
Knight made no reference to the Spanish or any other European settlers.
Eventually, archeologists would confirm that Spanish Diggings is a 400 square-mile series of Paleo-Indian quarries, dating to 10,000 years ago. As Gene Gade, president of the Vore Buffalo Jump Foundation, notes, “It was slowly accepted that the ‘Spanish Diggings’ were, in fact, the work of groups of hunters that had lived in the region and quarried the stone for projectile points, knives, scrapers, and other tools.”
Trade among tribes of the Plains
A general misperception of Native American enterprise and trade continues today. On the Wikipedia page on Indian Trade, the discussion centers on Native American interactions with the English at the Jamestown colony in Virginia, general information about tribes involved in the Canadian-Missouri  fur trade , and explains how some California tribes gathered slaves for the Spanish. The page omits any references to or examples of tribe-to-tribe trade.
Indians of the southern and northern Plains traded with each other for thousands of years. Flint points 13,000 years old, chiseled from the Texas quarries, have been found in eastern New Mexico. Quarried stone from the Obsidian Cliffs near Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyo. in  Yellowstone  Park, traveled to the the Ohio River Valley around 100-350 CE.
While archeological objects abound in Wyoming, the artifacts alone don’t tell the story of pre-settlement trade among nomadic Plains tribes. Moreover, even before the advent of Europeans, tribal boundaries fluctuated with weather, game populations and alliances with other tribes. For example, the Comanche, one of the most entrepreneurial of tribes, once were part of the Shoshone tribe and lived largely in what's now Wyoming. In the  middle 18th century they split from the Shoshone and moved south to rule the plains of Texas and Oklahoma.
Archeological artifacts do suggest, however, that native-to-native trade expanded over time. Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield, authors of the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World, say that the Hohokam tribe, centered in present day Arizona, traded seashells, which they had acquired from the Mojave tribe, for buffalo hides from various southern Plains tribes. “By between 500 and 200 B.C., North American Indians had established a vital network of trade.”
Those networks weren’t equally distributed, however, on the central plains.
Wyoming’s role in tribal networks
The center of Wyoming, close to modern-day Lander, is isolated and roughly 800 miles equidistant from the three major pre-settlement trading centers for tribes: The Dalles, where the Chinookan tribes gathered along the Columbia River in what’s now Oregon; Taos Pueblo in present New Mexico, which serviced the tribes of the southwest; and the Mandan/Hidatsa trade center, where the Knife River joins the Missouri River in modern-day North Dakota, where northern Plains tribes came to trade (see map).
There were also trade centers further south along the Missouri in what’s now South Dakota– the Arikara Center and the Dakota Rendezvous – that attracted mostly tribes from the southern Plains.
It would be reasonable to assume that entrepreneurial tribes inhabiting Wyoming faced the same obstacles as a modern Wyoming business in creating a trade hub: distance to markets, lack of a critical mass of customers, and inclement weather. That may be true.
Wyoming, however, was home to at least two enterprising tribes, the Crow, and particularly the Shoshone, who had their own trade fair, the Shoshone Rendezvous.
We know little about this event, including its exact location. The recognized authority on the Shoshone Rendezvous, Smithsonian ethnologist John C. Ewers, wrote in the early 1950s that the most likely location was in “in the river valleys of southwestern Wyoming west of the  South Pass —“a description that would also fit the later, better-known fur trade rendezvous of 1825-1840.
Ewers’s main source is Canadian fur trader M. Charles McKenzie’s narrative, “The Mississouri [sic] Indians. A narrative of four trading expeditions to the Mississouri, 1804, 1805, 1806, for the North-West Company.”
Tribes, aiming for handsome profit, would buy items from the either the Mandan/Hidatsa Center or the Dakota Rendezvous and transport them to southwest Wyoming each spring.
Relying on McKenzie, Ewers notes that in June 1805, the Crow traded 250 horses to the Hidatsa, who offered 200 guns in exchange. The next year the Hidatsa offered 200 guns to the Cheyenne, hoping to receive at least that many horses in exchange. Normal markups were 100 percent; the Crow sold horses to the Mandan and Hidatsa at twice the price they had paid at the Shoshone rendezvous. The river tribes doubled the prices again when trading with others, like themselves, on the upper Missouri.
W. Raymond Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Missouri,said that long before the advent of Europeans the Shoshone Rendezvous served as a trade link between tribes of the Pacific Coast and tribes of the upper Missouri.
“Crow Indians,” writes Wood, “carried goods to this rendezvous from the northern plains; Utes brought goods to it from the Southwest; and the Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Flatheads brought goods from the Great Basin and Plateau.”
The Shoshone Rendezvous eventually gave way to the  Green River  Rendezvous, generally credited as an invention of Rocky Mountain Fur Company co-founder, William Ashley.
Although there is no direct connection between the two, Ewers says its “probable” that Ashley’s rendezvous “was an adaption of the pre-existing Shoshoni trading rendezvous, at the same season of the year and the same region, in the advantage of white trappers.”
“We think that the Shoshone were among the great Indian traders in the interior West,” said Dudley Gardner, professor emeritus of history and political science at Western Wyoming Community College in  Rock Springs . “ Jim Bridger 's trading post location”—on the Black’s Fork of the Green River in what’s now Uinta County, Wyo.—“in the Dove Eater Band of the Shoshoni was no accident.”
From John C. Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1955), Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin #159, p. 11
Anthropologist John C. Ewers mapped the movement of horse acquisition from South to North, and tribe to tribe, over the Plains and along the Rocky Mountains. Most of the 1700s passed before horses reached the peoples of the Columbia Gorge.
One of the reasons Clark had so much difficulty in purchasing horses at The Dalles in the spring of 1806 is that he was at the very northwestern edge of their dispersal across North America. During the expedition's first and second years, it had traveled among Plains Indian nations where horses were plentiful and had occasioned a cultural revolution. In leaving the Columbia Gorge late in 1806, however, the expedition had left horse country behind. When Clark tried to obtain horses in the Gorge the next year, he was seeking a commodity that was still relatively rare locally.
The small "dawn horse," Hyracotherium, had gone extinct in North America1 after flourishing around 58 to 52 million years before present. Spanish explorers brought horses back to North America beginning in the 16th century, but they watched and protected their animals as closely as Lewis and Clark's men did their guns, knives, and tomahawks. Not until horse herds were established in Spanish settlements of Mexico and the future southwestern United States did the animals begin to disperse across North America again. They were traded and raided away from Spanish towns and ranches, and further traded and raided, gradually, from tribe to tribe. Initial-contact accounts from white explorers and traders provide information on which tribes owned horses—and which still did not—when whites first visited them. Horses' dispersal north on the Great Plains, west of the Rocky Mountains, and east toward the Mississippi, can be dated, in part, from those accounts. Oral traditions from tribes who received horses later add further dating information.
The route for horses to Indians of The Dalles was from the Santa Fe area through the Utes and Comanches of Utah (beginning in 1705), to the Comanches' relatives, the Shoshonis of Wyoming (roughly the 1710s to 1720s), to the  Nez Perce  (around 1730) who recalled the Shoshonis as their source. Living in a land blessed with grasses and remote from raiders from other nations, the Nez Perces developed horse herds and practiced controlled breeding. With animals to spare in trade, they began to take horses to The Dalles' trading mart late in the 18th century, initiating the horse's distribution onto the Columbia Plateau.
The Nez Perces and their neighbors the Palouse Indians also developed the Appaloosa breed, distinguished by its spotted or partially spotted coat (which can be of any color). These are light but sturdy steeds standing 57" to 64" tall. Their name comes from the Palouse River of Idaho and Washington, but to many Indians they were "raindrop horses," for their markings.
During the Indian Wars on the Northern Plains (including the  Nez Perce  War of 1877, when the army trailed Nez Perces from Idaho almost to Canada for months), U.S. Army horses required forage carried in supply wagons, and had difficulty crossing some rivers. To cavalry commanders' frustration, the smaller and sturdier Plains Indian horses (which they distinguished as "ponies") ate natural grasses and more easily forded and swam rivers. In short, army animals—unlike those that were Indian-owned—had had some ability to live off the land bred out of them.
1. Formerly, the North American genus Hyracotherium was classified separately as Eohippus, from the Greek eos (dawn) and hippos (horse). Hyracotherium (here-uh-co-THEER-ee-um) is modern Latin from the Greek hyrax (here-ucks) for a small herbivore, and therion (THEER-ee-on) for wild animal.
Primary Source
John C. Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1955), Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin #159.
Funded in part by a grant from the National Park Service, Challenge Cost Share Program
—Barbara Fifer; 08/06
Mandan, Hidatsa, Sahnish
These resources are written to provide information about the histories and cultures of the Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sahnish.
The Tribes believe their presence in North America is from the beginning of time. The Mandan call themselves “the People of the First Man.”
The Hidatsa were known as Minnetaree or GrosVentre. “Hidatsa” was formerly the name of a village occupied by these tribes. The term “Hidatsa” became a corruption of the word “midah-hutsee-ahti” translated meaning “house/ lodge made with willows.” The name Minnetaree, spelled in various ways means, “to cross the water.”
Oral and written history says the names “Arikara, Arickara, Ricarees and Rees” were given to them by the Pawnee and other informants to describe the way they wore their hair. The name “Sahnish” is the chosen name used among themselves which means “the original people from whom all other tribes sprang.” For purposes of this guide, the name of “Arikara” and its derivations which appear in treaties and in reference to legal documents will be used to preserve historical accuracy. All other references to these people will use the term “Sahnish.”
Although sharing cultures and histories for so long, the people keep a distinct sense of tribal relationships
Tribal Historical Overview
The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara live in the Missouri River area. Historians document the first tribe to occupy this area was the Mandan with the Hidatsa, and the Arikara moving up the river later. One group of Hidatsa came from the east.
The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara have separate and distinct narratives of their origins. The origins of the several bands within each group are separate. The Mandan indicate that there are two prevalent origin theories. One theory is that the Mandan migrated north along the Mississippi River area through southern Minnesota and northern Iowa to the plains in South Dakota. Archaeological findings and carbon dating indicates that the Mandan inhabited a village in the Heart Butte area about 900 A.D. Another theory is that the Mandan originated in the area some distance south of the Scattered Village site in what is now Mandan, North Dakota. The Hidatsa moved from central Minnesota to the eastern part of what is now North Dakota near Devils Lake, and moved to join the Mandan at the Missouri River about 1600 A.D. The Mandan and Hidatsa believe they were created in this area and have always lived here. According to anthropologists, the Sahnish people lived in an area that extended from the Gulf of Mexico, across Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
Dates of migrations of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara have been determined by archaeological investigation of village sites constructed along the Missouri River and elsewhere. Many of these sites, although collapsed and abandoned long before, were excavated along the Missouri River during the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1995 the State Historical Society of North Dakota completed the Missouri Trench National Historical Landmark Theme Study that summarized the archaeological investigation of the Missouri River area from southern South Dakota through North Dakota to Montana. Many of the sites were of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara origins.
Ethnographers (people who study cultural societies) group people by the languages they used or were likely to be used by a single group at one time. Indian nations were divided into several linguistic groups. The Mandan and Hidatsa tribes belong to the Siouan linguistic group, along with the Crow, Dakota, Lakota, Yanktonai, Assiniboine, Iowa-Oto-Missouri, Quapaw, and Omaha-Ponca-Osage-Kansa. The Arikara (Sahnish) belong to the Caddoan linguistic group, along with the Pawnee, Caddo, Wichita, Anadarko, Skidi, Tawakoni, and Waco.
This guide links the oral and written histories of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sahnish to provide a more accurate viewpoint. The oral tradition preserved the history and ceremonies of the Tribes through a strict and sacred process, thereby adding to the validity of oral tradition.
TRADE
Centuries before Euro-American penetration of the Far West, Native Americans had established networks of trails and trade relationships. Prized trade commodities such as marine shells, obsidian, and turquoise were located hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of miles from their origins. Among closely related tribal groups, intra-regional exchange of commodities bearing common social and ceremonial value was well organized throughout the continent. In addition, certain places served as important “trade centers” (Ewers 1968) with routes to other elaborate “trade nets.” (W.R. Wood 1972, 1980)
The tribes of the Mississippi River and the West were linked by a web of commercial relationships prior to European contact. Indian-white trade relations were an outgrowth and creation of Native trade patterns rather those of European design. (Ewers, 1968)
Primary Trade Centers for the Southwest and Plains. (Map adapted from N.R. Wood, 1972 and 1980, from Swagerty, in the Handbook of the North American Indians, Volume 4, page 352.)
Pre- and proto-historic patterns of Indian trade persisted at traditional primary and secondary centers. Although later modified by European ideas and commodities, inter-Indian trade among the Plains, Southwest, and Great Basin tribes in historic times was significant. (Vol. 9:201-205; Vol. 11:238-255)
It is not clear how many and from what distance separate groups traveled to the trading places of the Missouri River (Bowers, 11950:14-118; W.R. Wedel 1961:181-193), however by 1805 Crow, Assiniboine, Plains Cree, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, and Comanche of the Plains traded dried meat, deer hides, bison robes, mountain sheep bows, and other leather goods for garden produce and Knife River flint at the Mandan-Hidatsa center and were occasionally joined by bands of Teton Sioux at the Arikara center on a regular basis. (Ewers 1968: 17-18; Wood and Thiessen 1985:4-5)
All major trade centers were located among established and sedentary native populations with surplus-abundant economies able to selectively harvest and trade food and other commodities.
On the northern Plains, well before horses and European trade goods intensified the frequency and diversity of intertribal exchanges, a self-sufficient and surplus-abundant trading system as elaborate as that of the Southwest had been long established. The primary focuses of this system were the earthlodge villages of the Mandan-Hidatsa near the mouth of the Knife River in present-day North Dakota, and the Arikara near the mouth of the Grand River in present-day South Dakota.
The geographic location was as a valuable resource as was the craft specialization that enabled the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara to assume the position of middlemen linking riverine horticulturalist with upland hunters. (Ewers 1954; 1968:14-33) This east-west network was labeled the Middle Missouri System. (W.R. Wood 1972, 1980)
Fur Trade
The significance of the fur trade was an involved and complicated part of Indian-white relations. Euro-American efforts to find and extract resources from lands occupied by Indian tribes had its greatest impact on Indian tribes universally.
Among the more extractive industries was the fur trade. (Chittenden 1902; Innis 1962; P.C. Phillips 1961) The fur trade of the Far West extended and was built upon by long established Indian trade networks that involved the exchange of numerous commodities in addition to undressed pelts and hides. Second, there is no single contact experience or pattern of response in the Mississippi River area and the West even within culture areas or among close linguistic relatives.
This relationship was felt in other than economic terms. The ecological impact of commercial fur hunting was greatest on previously stable ecosystems (Wishart 1970; Kay 1979), the cultural impact because of the significance of fur-bearing animals played in the mythology, religious observances, diets, and material cultures of various Native Americans societies.
The trade may well have been the most important meeting round between Indians and whites from first encounter to the beginning of the reservation era. (Peterson and Anfinson 1984)
The role and impact of the fur trade on the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara is succinctly described by author Adrian Dunn in 1969:
“The fur trade era with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara was the motive for much of the early exploration of the frontier. It was also a prime factor in the destruction of their traditional cultures. The trade in the Upper Missouri became highly competitive, and in their quest for profits, corrupt traders resorted to the most brazen forms of deceit and trickery. Most harmful was the unrestrained use of whiskey in trading with the Indians, who were physically and spiritually defenseless to alcohol. Little regard was shown for the Indians’ welfare by the fur companies, but the damage could not have been nearly so devastating had it not been for the cooperation of the Indian agents of the United States government. The crime of traders, politicians, and other exploiters during this era, was that not only did they steal the Indians’ land, they crushed their spirit and destroyed their cultures.” (Dunn, 1963, p. 235)
Delegation of Arikaras, Gros Ventres, and Mandans meet with President Grant, 1874. (Photo courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Col. 0384-01-1)
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation Today. Map shows Lake Sakakawea and the inundated communities after the construction of Garrison Dam. (Map adapted from Meyers, 1977, page 193)
Chairman Gillette Weeps. George Gillette, Sahnish Chairman, and the Business Council witnessing the sale of 155,000 acres of land for the Garrison Dam and Reservoir. (Courtesy of the Associated Press, May 20, 1948, #1393)
In the early 1980s, the Three Affiliated Tribes sought compensation for lands that were lost to construction of the Garrison Dam. A committee was established to gather testimony and evidence in hearings held on the Standing Rock and Fort Berthold Reservations, as well as other sites. The Final Report of the Garrison Diversion Unit Commission pointed out that “the Tribes of the Standing Rock and Fort Berthold Reservations shouldered an inordinate share of the cost of implementing the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program’s mainstream reservoirs. (Final GDUC Report, Appendix F, p. 57) This report highlighted the inequities borne by the tribes:
· The tribes were not only unwilling to sell their land, but strongly opposed the taking of their land.
· They felt intimidated by the fact that construction on the dams began before Indian lands were acquired. They then felt that the taking of their lands was inevitable.
· During the negotiation phases, assurances were given expressly or by implication by various federal officials that problems anticipated by the Indians would be remedied. The assurances raised expectations which, in many cases, were never fulfilled.
· The quality of replacement homes was inadequate in many respects, but most notably with regard to insulation and construction necessary to meet severe climatic conditions. The deficiencies, in many cases, resulted in inordinately high heating bills.
· Indian lands taken were “prime river bottomland” and the most productive parts of the reservation.
· The quality of life enjoyed by the tribes on the river bottomlands had not been replicated in the removal areas.
· The rise in the incidence of trauma and stress-related maladies and illnesses following removal suggested a causal relationship.
· They were not justly compensated by the United States for the taking of their lands and related expenses resulting from the land taken.