Indigenous Travel and Rights of Passage on the Missouri River Christopher Steinke
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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 6-26-2015 The "Free Road": Indigenous Travel and Rights of Passage on the Missouri River Christopher Steinke Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Steinke, Christopher. "The "Free Road": Indigenous Travel and Rights of Passage on the Missouri River." (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/73 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Christopher J. Steinke Candidate History Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Samuel Truett, Chairperson Durwood Ball Margaret Connell-Szasz Juliana Barr ii THE "FREE ROAD": INDIGENOUS TRAVEL AND RIGHTS OF PASSAGE ON THE MISSOURI RIVER by CHRISTOPHER J. STEINKE A.B., English, Harvard College, 2004 M.A., History, University of Nebraska–Lincoln DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May, 2015 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to my advisor, Samuel Truett, for continuously believing in this project and steering me in new and rewarding directions. His intellectual vigor remains a source of inspiration, and I thank him for the many conversations in which he pushed me to think outside the box and consider unexpected connections. My thanks go as well to Margaret Connell-Szasz, Durwood Ball, and Juliana Barr for their valuable and perceptive feedback. I also thank my graduate student colleagues, whose friendship and good cheer provided a welcome respite from long hours in the library; my family for their constant encouragement and support; and especially my wife, whose own journey with a dissertation inspired this work. iv THE "FREE ROAD": INDIGENOUS TRAVEL AND RIGHTS OF PASSAGE ON THE MISSOURI RIVER by Christopher J. Steinke A.B., English, Harvard College M.A., History, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Ph.D., History, University of New Mexico ABSTRACT Well before Lewis and Clark, Native Americans traveled on the Missouri River, crossing it to visit friends and family members, shipping supplies downriver, and conducting visitors toward their villages. Their mobility on the upper Missouri River, an imposing and dangerous continental divide, granted them the power to define rights of passage across the midcontinent. Following the collapse of New Cahokia, Arikara and Mandan settlers pressed up the river valley and established expansive transportation and communication networks that stretched across the Missouri watershed. By 1650 their villages were influential centers of Native North America and places where river crossings held not only economic costs but also political and religious meanings. A century later, equestrianism had revolutionized indigenous travel in the Plains and transformed how Native peoples retrieved power from the Missouri corridor. Cottonwood became an essential fuel source, and fording sites in the river v valley gained strategic importance. In the late eighteenth century, the Lakota people asserted their new control of the Great Plains by freely crossing the Missouri. Even as equestrianism was accelerating indigenous networks in the Missouri watershed, Spanish and American officials were inviting Native leaders to make long trips downriver to St. Louis—voyages that tested indigenous protocols of border crossing. The expansion of the American fur trade in the 1820s threatened indigenous mobility networks on the upper Missouri River and led to the introduction of epidemics, including the devastating smallpox epidemic of 1837. By the 1870s, reservations lined the Missouri, and American officials hoped it would serve as a place of confinement. Yet Native Americans continued to travel on the river, defining their own rights of passage along it. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction............................................................................................................................1 1. They "Hollered" Across: The Power of Mobility on the Missouri River ..........................21 2. Capturing Power: Plains Equestrianism, Cottonwood, and the River Blockade ...............66 3. Making a Road: Native Delegates on the Missouri River .................................................107 4. The Costs of Mobility: The Fur Trade and the Remaking of the River Corridor..............147 5. Creating Boundary Lines: The Politics of River Crossings...............................................190 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................227 References..............................................................................................................................236 1 Introduction By November 1833, the German traveler Prince Maximilian of Wied had journeyed up the Missouri River and was camped at Fort Clark, a fur trade post next to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Knife River. He reported that month in his journal that he met a Native American woman who was preparing to travel the other direction. She was married to a mixed blood trader named Pierre Ortubise, who was wintering far downriver with a band of Yanktonai Sioux. She loaded three bullboats with baggage, tied the boats together, and set out on a journey that according to Maximilian would take two and half days.1 Images of Native American warriors on horseback dominate films and popular narratives about Plains Indian history. Equestrianism transformed Native societies in the Plains and contributed to the power of one Native society that famously contested American expansion: the Lakota Sioux. Within the past fifteen years, equestrianism has also received substantial attention in academic scholarship on indigenous and environmental history in the Great Plains. Historians Dan Flores, Elliott West, and Pekka Hämäläinen have revealed how societies such as the Comanches, Cheyennes, Crows, and Lakotas built and fed massive horse herds and have discussed the corresponding impact of equestrianism on the Plains environment. Their works demonstrate how these societies converted the power of the vast grasslands into fuel for mobility and transportation across the Plains.2 1 Entry for 16 November 1833, in Stephen S. Witte and Marsha V. Gallagher, eds., The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, vol. 3: September 1833–August 1834 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 63. 2 Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, "The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands," William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (April 2010): 173-208; Richard White, "The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," 2 Yet Maximilian's account of a Native woman preparing to travel alone on the river for probably close to fifty miles suggests that Plains Indians were achieving mobility and power in other ways. My dissertation examines how Native Americans transformed the Missouri River into a corridor of indigenous mobility and power. I argue that the Missouri River was much more than a road for American traders and explorers: it was a vast corridor of indigenous travel that bridged Native North America. Indigenous traffic moved along the river and into the river valley along "roads" and pathways within the largest watershed in North America. Native travelers enlisted the river current to transport supplies and visit neighbors downriver. In the winter, when the river froze over, it became a long thoroughfare across snowbound Plains. During the fall harvests, people from across the continent converged at the villages of the Mandans and Arikaras, who ferried visitors back and forth across the often formidable channel. The upper Missouri River was the center of indigenous trade and exchange in North America. And yet historians know very little about the logistics of indigenous travel in the Missouri Valley—how they built and used boats, where they forded the river—or how Native peoples understood and regulated this travel. Scholars have recognized the importance of the upper Missouri River in transcontinental trade and have described the content and scope of trade at the Arikara and Mandan villages. But they have not closely examined how Native Americans traveled within the Missouri valley and along the river itself. I consider the different ways in which Native Americans achieved mobility on the Missouri River as well as how they perceived and assigned river travel. This work helps explain how Mandans, Arikaras, and Lakotas connected transcontinental communication networks, became Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (1978): 319-43; Dan Flores, The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 3 continental middlemen and brokers, and accrued economic and territorial power in the process. It