Plains Indians facts for kids

The Plains Indians were those tribes of Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains of North America. At the height of their cultures, their main source of food was the large herds of buffalo. Hunting was not only the main activity of Plains Indians but was a central part of their religion.Their thinking and culture was formed from the natural environment they lived in. Up to the 1500s, tribes lived on the edges of the Great Plains. They were farmers and hunter-gatherers. From autumn to spring they raised crops. During the summers they went out onto the great plains to hunt buffalo on foot.

Juan de Oñate and other conquistadores brought horses, which changed the way the plains indians hunted. They quickly adapted to hunting buffalo on horseback as nomadic hunters. It began with the Apache who stole horses from the Spaniards. Horses also escaped into the wild. The Comanche soon followed and both tribes based their wealth and power on the horse. Horses were traded to or captured by other tribes and by the mid 1700s most plains indians had one or more horses. The next advance came from the British who brought guns to North America. The British also pushed many of the Eastern Woodlands tribes onto the Great Plains. After the 1850s, the horse culture of the plains indians ended as tribes were moved to Indian reservations.

Tribes

Tribes of the Great Plains included:

• The Arapaho
• The Blackfoot
• The Comanche
• The Cheyenne
• The Crow
• The Kiowa
• The Kitsai
• The Missouria (or Niúachi)
• The Mandan
• The Omaha
• The Osage
• The Otoe
• The Pawnee
• The Saulteaux (or Plains Ojibwe)
• The Plains Cree
• The Plains Apache (also called the Kiowa Apache)
• The Ponca
• The Quapaw (or Arkansas and Ugahxpa)
• The Sarcee
• The Sioux (Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota)
• The Tonkawa
• The Wichita

Western movies

Buffalo Bill Cody featured plains Indians in his Wild West shows beginning in the 1880s. When Hollywood began making movies, the western was a favorite topic. They introduced the plains Indians as the stereotypical Native American Indian to the entire world. When fiction about the American Old West shows Indians, they are usually plains Indians.

Related pages

• Great Plains

Images for kids

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  Stumickosúcks of the Kainai in 1832

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  Spotted Tail of the Lakota Sioux

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  Bison hunt under the wolf-skin mask, George Catlin, c. 1832

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  Early Native American tribal territories color-coded by linguistic group

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  Blackfoot warrior, painted between 1840 and 1843 by Karl Bodmer

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  Stump Horn of the Cheyenne and his family with a horse and travois, c. 1871–1907

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  This painting by Alfred Jacob Miller portrays Plains Indians chasing buffalo over a small cliff. The Walters Art Museum.

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  A pile of bison skulls in the 1870s.

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  The Wichita were an agrarian Southern Plains tribe, who traditionally lived in beehive-shaped houses thatched with grass surrounded by extensive maize fields. They were skilled farmers who traded agricultural products with the nomadic tribes in exchange for meat and hides.

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  "Assiniboine hunting buffalo", painting by Paul Kane

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  An Oglala Lakota Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge. Illustration by Frederic Remington

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  Rainmaking among the Mandan, by George Catlin, 1830s

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  This painting depicts the speed and violence of an encounter between the U.S. cavalry and Plains Indians.

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  Southern Cheyenne Chiefs Lawrence Hart, Darryl Flyingman and Harvey Pratt in Oklahoma City, 2008