Missouri River - First Peoples

First Peoples

Archaeological evidence, especially in Missouri, suggests that man first made his presence in the watershed of the Missouri River between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. During the end of the last glacial period, a great migration of humans began, traveling via the Bering land bridge from Eurasia into and throughout the Americas. As they traveled slowly over centuries, the Missouri River formed one of the main migration paths. Most settled in the Ohio Valley and the lower Mississippi River Valley, but many, including the Mound builders, stayed along the Missouri, becoming the ancestors of the later indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.

The Native Americans that lived along the Missouri had access to ample food, water, and shelter. Many migratory animals inhabited the plains at the time, providing them meat, clothing, and other everyday items; there were also great riparian areas in the river's floodplain that provided them with natural herbs and staple foods. No written records from the tribes and peoples of the pre-European period exist because they did not use writing. According to the writings of explorers, some of the major tribes along the Missouri River included the Otoe, Missouria, Omaha, Ponca, Brulé, Lakota, Sioux, Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, Assiniboine, Gros Ventres and Blackfeet.

Natives used the Missouri, at least to a limited extent, as a path of trade and transport. In addition, the river and its tributaries formed tribal boundaries. Lifestyles of the indigenous mostly centered around a semi-nomadic culture; many tribes would have different summer and winter camps. However, the center of Native American wealth and trade lay along the Missouri River in the Dakotas region on its great bend south. A large cluster of walled Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara villages situated on bluffs and islands of the river was home to thousands, and later served as a market and trading post used by early French and British explorers and fur traders. Following the introduction of horses to Missouri River tribes, possibly from feral European-introduced populations, natives' way of life changed dramatically. The use of the horse allowed them to travel greater distances, and thus facilitated hunting, communications and trade.

Once, tens of millions of American bison (commonly called buffalo), one of the keystone species of the Great Plains and the Ohio Valley, roamed the plains of the Missouri River basin. Most Native American groups in the basin relied heavily on the bison as a food source, and their hides and bones served to create other household items. In time, the species came to benefit from the indigenous peoples' periodic controlled burnings of the grasslands surrounding the Missouri to clear out old and dead growth. The large bison population of the region gave rise to the term great bison belt, an area of rich annual grasslands that extended from Alaska to Mexico along the eastern flank of the Continental Divide. However, after the arrival of Europeans in North America, both the bison and the Native Americans saw a rapid decline in population. Hunting eliminated bison populations east of the Mississippi River by 1833 and reduced the numbers in the Missouri basin to a mere few hundred. Foreign diseases such as smallpox raged across the land, decimating Native American populations. Left without their primary source of sustenance, many of the remaining indigenous people were amalgamated into resettlement areas and reservations.