Lakota Ascendancy

The Comanche regime was the most powerful indigenous empire in the post-1600 Americas and the largest and most enduring nomadic imperial formation in the Western Hemisphere. But it was not one of a kind.

In the late seventeenth century, the Lakotas were part of the great Sioux alliance, whose homelands stretched from Lake Superior to the upper Mississippi River. The Sioux alliance consisted of seven tribes, oyates, which clustered into four broad divisions: the Dakotas were in the east, the Yanktons and Yanktonais in the middle, and the Lakotas in the west. Crisscrossing kinship ties bonded the tribes into a loose coalition, Ochethi Sakowiy, which could mobilize vast numbers of warriors against common enemies. Internal trade was crucial to the allied Sioux, whose borders were lined with powerful native societies who had better access to European markets and guns and who capitalized on their firepower to isolate the Sioux. In the early eighteenth century, the Dakotas made a concerted effort to build ties with French traders in the Great Lakes region, and they relied on the Lakotas to supply them with beaver pelts that could be exchanged for firearms and iron in the east. In re­turn, Lakotas received guns, enough to expand their trapping grounds westward. To sustain themselves in their lengthening western sojourns, they relied more and more on the bison, which became their mainstay.^[2399]

During the early eighteenth century, Lakotas extended their operations across the prairies all the way to the Missouri River. In the process, they dispossessed sev­eral native societies while transforming themselves into full-time bison hunters. They acquired some horses—intertribal trade on the western grasslands had propelled the equine frontier far to the north and east—but used the animals only for transportation.

A sprawling smallpox epidemic between 1775 and 1782 was a turning point. The disease devastated the densely populated villages but moved less effectively among the mobile and scattered Lakotas. Once the pestilence had run its course, killing up to two-thirds of the villagers, Lakotas pushed into the Missouri Valley. They drove the remaining Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras to the north, and they forced the Omahas, Otoes, Poncas, Missouris, and lowas to abandon their riverine villages for semi-nomadic life in the west. The conquest made them the dominant power in the middle Missouri Valley. It gave them access to the plains trade networks, which supplied them with large numbers of horses, and it gave them control over the Missouri's many tributaries, where they found grass, water, and shelter to sup­port their growing herds. The conquest also put them in a position to dominate the American fur trade, which developed rapidly in the Missouri Valley after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Lakotas now found themselves at the intersection of two sprawling technological frontiers: a northeastward moving horse frontier and a southwestward moving gun frontier. Soon most of their bands were fully mounted and well-armed, hunting and fighting on horseback with aplomb.^[2401]

The American fur trade revolved around bison robes, which in turn drove the Lakotas to expand again.

By the 1830s, Lakota territory covered the grasslands west and south of the Missouri River, north of the Platte River, and east of the Powder River. Like Comancheria, it was a politically stratified multiethnic realm that cast a long shadow over the surrounding regions. At its center stood the Black Hills, a major commercial hub and a gathering place where Lakotas and their allies came together to trade and reaffirm their bonds. From there, Lakotas commanded a vast domain that reflected the decentralized nature of their polity: its seven fires—the Brules, Oglalas, Minneconjous, Two Kettles, Sans Arcs, Sihasapas, and Hunkpapas—were widely dispersed, each dominating a distinct section of the realm. And in their midst lived thousands of Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Poncas, and others whom Lakotas had embraced through intermarriage and wolakhota, permanent bonds of peace. But the relationships were not necessarily symmetrical. Cheyennes and Arapahoes maintained an uneasy alliance with the various Lakota bands, sometimes joining them in war, sometimes competing with them over hunting privileges, and some­times serving as trading middlemen to horse-rich Comancheria.

Like Comanches, Lakotas managed a complex system of hierarchies and depen­dencies on their far-flung borders. In the western high plains, they raided the Crows and Shoshones systematically for horses and captives, and in the south, across the Platte River watershed, they kept the Pawnees, Otoes, Poncas, and Omahas in a state of siege, raiding them for horses and grain and forcing them to limit their hunting operations. While extending their reach deep to the west and south, Lakotas remained a dominant presence along the Missouri Valley. Their massive hunting grounds enabled them to control much of the hide and robe supply for the fur trade, which induced the Americans to bestow special privileges upon them: preferential access to trade, prestige items, high-quality guns, and even vaccines. Their com­mand of bison ranges also gave Lakotas power over the Missouri Indians. They confined the Arikaras in their riverine villages, preventing effective hunting, and then forced them to pay vast quantities of garden produce for their meat and hides, treating them, as one observer put it, as “a kind of serf who cultivates for them and who, as they say, takes, for them, the role of women.” Secure in their new home ter­ritory, many Lakota bands traveled each spring far to the east to the James River, where they reunited with their Yankton and Yanktonai relatives and exchanged horses and bison products for guns and other manufactured goods.^[2404]

Unlike any other plains society, the Lakotas grew in numbers in the early nine­teenth century. Abundant food supply, a vast territory, a decentralized social orga­nization, and regular vaccines gave them a strong measure of protection against the disease outbreaks that periodically ravaged the interior. In 1837 and 1838 a virulent smallpox epidemic killed tens of thousands of Indians across the northern plains but, once again, the disease touched only lightly the Lakotas, whose main camps were far away from the Missouri Valley, the principal disease corridor.

Like the Comanches in the south, the Lakotas now dominated a large section of the North American interior, relying on equestrian mobility to open access points to surrounding societies, to integrate places and people, and to forge distinct zones of exchange and exploitation. Their power rested not on direct control of others but on a capacity, underwritten by military superiority, to do certain things—raid, extort, intimidate, and kill—over and over again, year after year, and across vast distances. This gave Lakota power politics a seemingly fickle character; call it on-and-off- again imperialism. Spectacular foreign political action, punctuated with ominous lulls, allowed the Lakotas to achieve what sedentary empires have achieved through institutional face-to-face control: harness resources, create dependencies, enforce boundaries, and inspire awe.

Mobility and flexibility also defined the internal makeup of the Lakota so­ciety. Ecological and foreign political imperatives compelled the dozens of Lakota bands, thiyospayes, to live far apart from one another: each had its own riverine niche to sustain itself through the winter, each defended its domain against enemy incursions, and each was led by a leader, ithdychays, and an informal council of adult males. But that spatial decentralization was balanced with a strong centrip­etal tradition. Thiyospayes cooperated in raiding, hunting, and trading, and occa­sionally coalesced into tribes to wage war and conduct diplomacy. The focal point of the Lakota annual cycle was the Sun Dance, which saw dozens of thiyospayes joining in large tribal and intertribal camps. These great summer gatherings doubled as political councils where ithdychays discussed and decided on matters of mutual importance, all deliberations following time-honored conventions. For a few intensive weeks, large clusters of Lakotas worshipped and hunted together, married across band and tribal boundaries, and forged new kinship ties through the hupka adoption ceremony, reaffirming their identity as one kindred commu­nity of peace and friendship.

That sense of unity became critically important when the United States' west­ward expansion gained momentum. In the early nineteenth century, Lakota and American interests had largely complemented one another, but at mid-century they began to collide. Escalating overland migration along the Platte River dis­turbed bison herds and resulted in violent clashes between settlers and Lakotas. At the same time, the bison ecology across the northern plains began to falter under the prolonged market hunting, which in turn intensified inter-tribal rivalries over bison ranges. In response to these challenges, Lakotas adopted an increasingly ter­ritorial approach to space. They forced the Pawnees, Crows, and Blackfeet to re­treat, claiming vast tracts of land in the south and west by the right of conquest, and they forced the United States to recognize their territorial sovereignty in a series of treaties in the 1850s and 1860s.

The upshot was that the Lakotas continued to expand well into the late nine­teenth century, even as their power structure grew increasingly hollow. Measured exploitative raiding gave way to unforgiving territorial warfare, which enlarged their hunting grounds but also removed exploitable societies from their borders. At the same time, the fur trade continued to decline with the bison herds, eroding the cord that had held Lakotas and Americans on a common orbit. Lakota tribes united behind a policy of banning all land cessions to the United States and tightened their bonds with other native groups, assembling a coalition that included Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Yanktonai Sioux, and Santee Sioux refugees from Minnesota. A massive indigenous bloc emerged in the heart of the continent, stalling railroad construc­tion and settlement and pushing Washington, D.C., to step up its military pressure. Relying on their superior mobility and ability to shape-shift, the Lakotas and their allies withdrew into the depths of the high plains, emerging only to collect rations and guns at government agencies, to raid trespassing immigrants, and to defend their borders against punitive US incursions. These tactics yielded several deci­sive military victories, the last of which, at the Little Bighorn in 1876, proved too decisive.^[2407]

The disaster of the Little Bighorn galvanized the United States' resolve to subju­gate the Lakotas. In 1876 the Lakotas were a formidable independent power, able to keep an emerging industrial behemoth at bay; a year later, following a brutal US Army winter campaign, they were starving and incapacitated. A treaty, signed by a small Lakota minority under military duress, transferred seven million acres, in­cluding the Black Hills, to the United States, and established permanent reservations for the Lakota tribes.^[2408] Their nomadic—and briefly imperial—existence on the plains had come to an abrupt end.