The Souix [sic]7 is a Stout bold-looking people (the young men hand Som) & well made. The Warriors are Verry much deckerated with Porcupin quils & feathers, large leagins and mockersons, all with buffalow roabs of Different Colours. The Squars wore Peticoats and white Buffalow roabs.
Whatever the Otoe had been, these men at last were true Plains Indians, most certainly. They were a people of great number and power, and most assuredly not to be trifled with. Yet the white man did trifle with them from the very beginning—by first calling them something they did not call themselves. They had long termed themselves the Dakota. The name Sioux is a complicated French corruption of a much more complex Ojibwa word and, so far as is known, has been employed since the mid-1700s: the Irish-born colonial official Sir William Johnson, who traded with the Indians from his home in New York, wrote in his diary for 1761, “I picked up a pair of shoes made by the Sioux Indin to the westward.”
Properly the Sioux formed a part—an extremely large part—of the Plains Indians. The Sioux linguistic group (the easiest means of classification, ethnologists say) enfolded an immense area that arched from the upper Mississippi River in Minnesota’s Thousand Lakes region clear across to the Rocky Mountain foothills in Montana and Wyoming, down in the east to Texas, and down in the west to parts of western South Dakota. Confusingly, several Plains tribes were not members of the Great Sioux Nation—the Blackfoot and the Gros Ventre tribes to their west were not, nor were the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Pawnee to their south. (The Ojibwa, the Kickapoo, and the Illinois beyond to the east were not part of the Sioux Nation, nor were they Plains Indians at all.)
Within the Sioux Nation there were three main groups, based on subtle differences in their language. In the west were the Lakota and Teton Sioux; toward the east, such groups as the Santee and the Osage; and here where Lewis and Clark first met them, the Yankton. Each—together with their many subgroups, most of these more sedentary than the endlessly nomadic Sioux proper—had a reputation for power, determination, and utter fearlessness.
The best-known of their number, Crazy Horse—the leader who in 1876 oversaw the defeat and death of George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn—remains their most vivid exemplar. Sitting Bull, who did much to unite the various Plains Indian tribes to resist the depredations of the whites and whose spirit oversaw the same battle, is another; he was one of the historical figures chosen (if somewhat controversially) by President Obama in a book published in 2009 as a role model for his young daughters.
Both men seemed tougher than tungsten. Sitting Bull, bowlegged from a life in the saddle, seemed to have had an unlucky left side: he limped because he had been shot in the left foot by a Crow Indian, he had a wound in his left hip after being shot there by a soldier, and he had taken an arrow in his left forearm after a tussle with a posse of Flatheads. Before his backstage role at Little Bighorn, he offered a sacred pledge of a hundred pieces of his own flesh and sat with bovine stoicism while his brother carved fifty tiny morsels out of each of his arms. Small wonder that the Lewis and Clark Expedition diaries offer similar tales of Indian grace under pressure: of Sioux warriors who walked unflinching into any battle, unprotected; and of a group marching on ice who disregarded cracks and fell through and drowned, with those following disdaining the idea of walking around, but marching ahead regardless.
Matters might have turned out more peaceably if Lewis and Clark had realized from the start the immense pride of these peoples and the significance of the Sioux’s samurai-like code. For although the meetings in the autumn of 1804 between those first Yankton Sioux, and then on a later occasion in September with the much more belligerent Teton Sioux, both went well enough, the encounters in hindsight turned out to be the starting points in a spiral of hostility between the ever-westward-moving whites and a people—an enemy, in time—who turned out to be case-hardened, imperturbable, and initially well-nigh undefeatable.
The explorers might have suspected something from the uneasiness of their meeting with the Teton on September 23. For although it did end well, there was a potentially dangerous row—the Teton chiefs wanted tobacco and wouldn’t let the boats pass upstream until they were given some. Lewis lost his temper, cast off his fleet, and contemptuously threw a number of carrots of tobacco onto the bank. The Teton, on a hair trigger, might have slaughtered the expedition members there and then—but accepted the tobacco without the slight and let the ropes go.
It was a small enough event. But even though over time white Americans and some Indian tribes developed a degree of mutual understanding and friendship, in general there grew a deep and pervasive mutual loathing between them, a hatred that metastasized during the rest of the century, marked by attacks, skirmishes, battles, and eventually in 1876 by an all-out nation-enfolding war—with Custer’s famous Last Stand at Little Bighorn its most especially savage episode.
Savage from the white perspective, that is. Fourteen years later a welling-up of white revenge led to an even greater tragedy, one never to be forgotten by any Native American. It was in the winter of 1890 that US cavalrymen, many legatees of the Little Bighorn battle, descended en masse on a group of 120 Lakota Sioux, all members of the mystical and mysterious and much-feared group known as the Ghost Dancers. The soldiers herded them, together with more than 230 women and children, along the banks of the Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in what is now South Dakota. And there, on the bitterly cold, snow-dusted final Monday morning of the year, and after a brief altercation that acted as a tragic tripwire, the soldiers opened fire on them—shooting with their rifles and, most notably, with four newly bought rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannon, which in a matter of minutes mowed down the trapped Indians by the score, the detonations of their enormous shells creating a true bloodbath.
At the very least, 150 Sioux and their families died in the chaos of the shooting. Once the cavalrymen had lowered their weapons, nature conspired to render the scene more permanent, as frigid weather rolled in from the west to consolidate and harden the day’s terrible handiwork. It snowed a full Dakota blizzard, and when it eased the bodies were left frozen in grotesque and unforgettable contortions. There is a famous, shameful photograph of the leader Spotted Elk, his body etched with snow, his arms frozen by cold or rigor, seemingly trying to get up from the ground, pinioned in icebound pain, his face the picture of purest agony.
The Massacre at Wounded Knee left a panorama of memory that of course Lewis and Clark can never have imagined—yet some may say that their occasionally high-handed behavior toward those who had inhabited the lands over which they ventured must have played some part in sowing the seeds of ill will, and which culminated in so much eventual misery. The intent of the men and their president may have been noble; national unity may have been their distant aim; and yet division, in later years, was to be at least one unintended consequence.
Yet not all of their encounters with American Indians were so fraught. It was some few weeks later, in November, when the winter chill had begun to freeze the rivers and farther upstream travel was proving difficult, then impossible, that they first met up with a middle-aged French fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau and his two wives—one of whom, most memorably, was a heavily pregnant fifteen-year old Shoshone girl named Sacagawea. A captive youngster from an Indian tribe based in the distant western mountains, she would become in time an unforgettable, romantic American heroine and perhaps one of the better-remembered human legacies that the Great Plains would bestow upon President Jefferson’s great unifying expedition.
By now the men had moved beyond the main Sioux lands and had reached the territory of three of the lesser Indian tribes, the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Hidatsa (the latter also for some reason known by the French who met them as the Gros Ventre, or Big Belly), which were all affiliated with and linguistically part of the Sioux. But unlike the nomadic Sioux proper, these tribes were in the main sedentary farmers, who raised crops (developing a strain of maize still planted today) and kept dogs and livestock, and (long after their encounter with Lewis and Clark) who died in massive numbers of a smallpox epidemic.
But in 1804 they were healthy, numbered