Coming of Europeans
When the Europeans arrived in what is now the United States and Canada, they found no Indians with highly developed civilizations such as those found in Mexico and Peru. The Indians north of Mexico had a Stone Age type of culture. They obtained their food by hunting, fishing, gathering, and, in many cases, small-scale farming.
How Indians obtained food. Most Indians hunted and fished for their food or gathered wild seeds, nuts, and roots. Farming was the main source of food only in the Southwest, Middle America, and the Andes. Many tribes of the Northeast and Tropical Forest areas also raised some crops.The coming of the Europeans quickly changed many Indian ways of life. The Indians eagerly sought firearms, steel knives and tomahawks to replace their stone implements, and even pieces of iron for arrowheads. Glass beads replaced wampum, laboriously made from shells. The Europeans were quite as eager for the Indians' furs. There had always been a certain amount of trade among tribes, but now Indians became professional hunters and trappers.
The greatest change in Indian ways of life came with acquisition of the horse. Horses were brought to North America by the Spanish in the 16th century and proved so adaptable to the new conditions that herds of wild horses soon roamed the western plains. At first the Indians killed them for food. Later they realized their value as a means of transport. They traded with the Spanish in Mexico for horses and also stole them. The use of the horse moved northward from tribe to tribe, eventually reaching the Sioux living along the upper Mississippi by 1800.
Horses made it possible for Indians to follow the buffalo herds and to use the buffalo for much of their food and its hide to make their clothing and tepees. When they acquired horses, the Teton Sioux abandoned all agriculture and moved into the Plains. For the first time there was an adequate food supply, and their population increased enormously. Many tribes—including the Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Crow, Arikara, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, and Pawnee—measured the wealth of a tribe by the number of horses it possessed.
Thus developed a distinctive Plains culture, based on buffalo hunting and the horse. The Plains Indian astride a horse and wearing a feathered headdress became the archetypical Indian for most whites; this was the Indian of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, Frederic Remington's paintings, and numerous films and television shows.
This Plains culture lasted little more than a century. It began with the horse, obtained indirectly from Europeans, and it ended when white hunters killed off the buffalo herds, in the 1880's.
