Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 74, Native Americans 14, The Plains.

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Having spent a few episodes covering the east coast of the United States, today we turn to

the interior and to the plains. We'll do this, of course, with a passage from Alvin Joseph's

The Indian Heritage of America.

Quote,

To many non-Indians, the tribes of the North American plains have become the most familiar of all the Indians of the Americas,

although that familiarity is generally based on a stereotype that shows little recognition the full scope of the

history or culture of the various Plains peoples. In historic times, the Plains Indians, living

in the broad expanse of the continent's heartland between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains,

and from the Saskatchewan River Basin and Canada to central Texas,

were dynamic and colourful.

Both their culture and history, after white contact, lent themselves to the works of writers and dramatists,

who so romanticised the hard-riding, war-bonneted buffalo hunters and warriors of the 19th century,

that in the minds of many persons, they became the image of all American Indians.

But some of their material traits of that period that seemed to make them the epitome of all Indians were not

Indian at all. The horse and the gun stock characteristics of the stereotype Planned Indians were

acquired from white men. Moreover, the flowering of the equestrian plains life was a late and relatively short-lived

phenomenon occurring only after the arrival of the white men in the new world, and after the

...