Pekka Häkäläinen: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates proposes three “noble lies” or myths teachers will tell their students. One of them, the myth of autochthony, strengthens citizens’ attachment to the territory of his proposed polis. Tell the young that their people initially sprang from the very soil the polis occupies; this land is your land because your ancestors literally grew up out of it, coming from nowhere else but here. In North America today, ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ Americans sometimes make this claim. We didn’t come here from Asia, traversing a ‘land bridge’ that connected the two continents, millennia ago. We originated here. The Lakotas claim ownership of large sections of the upper Midwest on exactly those, well, grounds, although it’s impossible to say whether they believe it.
Häkäläinen clarifies the matter. He sidesteps the question of Asian origins, contenting himself with showing that the Lakotas entered the territory they now claim much more recently from lands they had held farther east on the North American continent. This is only one result of his excellent approach—telling the story of the Lakotas not as an adjunct to the story of their American conquerors but as their story, “central and enduring protagonists who contended with a range of colonial powers since the seventeenth century variously diverting, foiling, and boosting their ambitions.” Telling the Lakotas’ story as their story does not, however, mean telling it as they tell it to themselves, and to others. Häkäläinen writes history, not mythology.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Lakotas numbered among the several tribes of hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands of North America, a minor tribe (never more than 15,000 in population) clustered around the Great Lakes, with “no guns and no metal weapons” with “little political clout.” They nonetheless undertook “what may be the most improbable expansion in American history,” leaving “their ancient homelands and reinvent[ing] themselves as horse people in the continental grasslands that stretched seemingly forever into the horizon.” This was hardly inevitable, the working-out of some historical teleology. They pursued a strategy, one eminently successful as exercised with and against other Indian nations and empires and also with and against the French and British empires. “How Lakotas harnessed that imperial cauldron to serve their interests…is one of the great untold stories in American history.” It was the United States’s imperial venture that did them in, but even then not straightforwardly so, as “Lakotas and Americans expanded simultaneously into the West, often claiming the same tracts of land and water,” “neither compromis[ing] their core convictions about themselves and the world,” and “often talk[ing] past one another.”
The Lakotas were part of the seven nations or tribes constituting what for convenience’s sake Häkäläinen calls the Sioux, or what the members of the confederation themselves called, and still call, the Ochéti Šakówin or Seven Council Fires (‘Sioux’ meant ‘enemy’ among their Indian enemies, primarily the Iroquois). They had come into the area immediately west of the Great Lakes from the central Mississippi Valley, “triggered by a warmer and wetter climate cycle that began in the ninth century, rendering the lands in the previously colder north and direr west more appealing.” Initially, the Lakotas were not even the most prominent Sioux tribe, that honor being held by “their close kin,” the Dakotas, who had entered the area before the other Sioux. The Lakotas settled farthest to the west, near the Minnesota Valley. In the Great Lakes region, their main enemies were the Crees, who lived along the northern shores of Lake Superior, and the Sauteurs, both of whom enjoyed the advantage of iron weapons, for which they had traded from the French. Between the Sioux and the French “lay dozens of Native nations, all of them inside the gun and iron frontier and all of them familiar with the European newcomers and their strange ideas and habits.” To make direct contact with the French, in order to obtain their novel and seemingly magical weapons, “each of those nations would have to be won over, pushed aside, or otherwise neutralized.”
Against the better-armed Crees and Sauteurs, the Sioux confederation pitted not only the warlike virtue of courage but better organization. As a whole, the confederation numbered some 30,000 by the middle of the seventeenth century; they recognized one another as kind, “bound to one another and the universe by a pervasive life-giving essence, wakhán.” The confederation shouldn’t be understood in a formal sense, having “no overarching governing structure or leaders who could speak for all members of the alliance.” Along with kinship, they shared the same language; the Council Fires called themselves the “real people,” distinguishing themselves “from strangers and thókas, enemies.” Nor did they think of their kinship primarily as a matter of blood; “anybody capable of proper sentiments, words, and deeds would become a relative, takúye.” It was a matter of ethos. “Sioux saw in every person a potential kin, which meant that their society had no predetermined boundaries.” Within each Council Fire several bands, villages, or “camp circles” lived together throughout the year; the circle, itself a symbol of “spiritual unity and cosmological order,” included twenty households, more or less. They necessarily occupied a set space, but only temporarily, moving from woodlands to grasslands to marshlands in an annual cycle. The Seven Council Fires consisted of “a human kaleidoscope where individuals, families, and bands moved around constantly, arranging themselves into different constellations as circumstances demanded,” united not by territorial boundaries but by “a thick lattice of kinship ties that transcended local and regional identities,” a framework wherein “they could travel anywhere within their realm and always be among kin.”
As for the foreigners, they too reinforced ties among the Sioux. Like so many ‘ancient’ peoples, they waged war frequently, “to protect their lands, to exact revenge, to secure hunting and trading privileges, to enhance their power and prestige by taking slaves, to preempt threats,” singing their war song: “I am going to War, I will revenge the Death of such a Kinsman, I will slay, I will burn, I will bring away Slaves, I will eat men.” If a father died in battle, his daughters “received slaves and had the right to decide whether they lived or died,” while the victorious warriors obtained wives from among the captives.
The smallpox epidemic which began in Massachusetts in the 1630s indirectly helped the Sioux. By the end of the decade, it was ravaging the Wyandots in the Great Lakes region, as the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes trade corridor “became a disease corridor,” with mortality rates around fifty percent of the population. “Despair and sorrow gripped entire communities, spawning apathy or, increasingly, violence to ease the pain.” This included the powerful confederation of the Five Iroquois Nations, who responded to their devastating loss of population by a campaign of conquest, with “warfare more ferocious than anyone could remember.” The Wyandots were among their victims, chased into the western Great Lakes, but they were not alone. “Several nations crumbled as political entities,” while others fled “in the face of the most concentrated projection of power in seventeenth-century America,” as “Iroquois war parties carried thousands of war prisoners into Iroquoia, where clan matrons slated them for slavery, adoption, or execution.” The lucky ones were “adopted into Iroquois clans and assumed the social role and name of the deceased, thereby repairing fractured lineages as newly born Iroquois.”
As the refugees from Iroquois depredations crowded into the area between Lake Michigan and the southern shore of Lake Superior, with their iron and guns, they threatened the Sioux. Using the Odawas as middlemen, Seven Council Fires established a treaty with the French, hoping to exchange furs for iron and guns. Since, “neither possessed the power to dictate to the other…they were forced to accommodate one another” as best they could, given “the yawning cultural gap that separated them.” And they intermixed through mutual gift giving and marriage. The Sioux called the French governor in distant Montreal the Onontio or father, a father conceived less as a commanding head of household as a kind and generous benefactor. In fact, they “hardly tolerated one another” but worked for their mutual interests to stabilize the region in order to maintain the benefits of trade. But the Sauteurs and other tribes, themselves pressured from the east by the Iroquois, maintained their advantage in weaponry. “Whatever the reason, Sioux remained outsiders. Odawas, Wyandots, and others would shun alliances with them and keep driving into their hunting lands” in “a massive war zone” where the Sioux “fought some dozen nations, vying for hunting rights, trade, and predominance.” The Sioux began to retreat to the west of the Mississippi River, only to find themselves at war with the Iowas.
“Yet the seven fires possessed a singular advantage: they were more numerous than any of their enemies, boasting a population that, by some estimates, was thirty times larger than that of the geopolitically privileged Sauteurs.” Their distance, their isolation, hurt them geopolitically but helped them to avoid contagious diseases, there being no evidence of any epidemic in Sioux territory in the seventeenth century. What they lacked in weaponry they made up for in warriors, fielding thousands on a battlefield against enemy war parties of a few hundred. And the western lands they had moved into were rich in bison; the French began calling them the “Nation of the beef.”
The French needed them more and more. The English had allied with the Iroquois, threatening the numerically inferior French. For their part, “what the Sioux needed was a thorough geopolitical realignment of the American interior.” They allied with their longtime enemies, the Sauteurs, to the delight of the French. By now, they were well established in the western lands, and even pushed back into the western Great Lakes. But in 1670, King Charles II of England chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company—bad geopolitical news for the French, who responded by strengthening their alliance with the Sioux and Sauteurs in the west. This enabled the Sioux to insist that the French come to them, rather than insisting that the Sioux venture eastward toward the French. “To be powerful in late seventeenth-century North American meant having allies and kin; not to need to move “connoted power,” as “the weak traveled to the more powerful, and markets were not so much opened as brought in.” In this, the Sioux had an unwitting ally in Louis XIV’s court: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis’s finance minister, who issued an edict opening inland trade, quite in contrast with his usual mercantilism. With beaver pelts satisfying the French appetite for luxury clothing, the Sioux finally “had broken Lakes people’s grip on the fur trade,” with vastly increased “access to guns and iron”—a “terrifying development for the Great Lakes Indians.” “Dangerously isolated just a few years earlier, the Sioux country emerged in the 1680s as a central place where commercial and diplomatic circles converged. The Sioux now had allies, iron, and guns—and the eye of the French.”
With that, the Iroquois, armed with English guns and goods, pushed back, sending war parties into lands south and west of Lake Michigan and alarming the French, who knew a proxy war when they saw one. By now, the French knew that the Mississippi River flowed south to the Gulf of Mexico, not west to the Pacific Ocean. This made the lands between Lake Michigan and the lower Ohio and middle Mississippi Valleys all the more crucial for their empire. But the Iroquois had the warriors on the ground, and “New France was soon tottering.” Only the alliance with Sioux could save it. But further arming the Sioux “risked alienating the Lakes Indians, New France’s ancient shield against the Iroquois.” The shield turned against the one it had protected, as the French lacked the material goods to appease all of their allies. This gave the Sioux even greater leverage over France.
In general, “seventeenth-century North America was a vast Indigenous ocean speckled with tiny European islands.” The Europeans might claim “vast chunks of the continent through the doctrines of discover and terra nullius (no one’s land), but such claims mattered little on the ground where the Indians controlled the balance of power.” Not for long, however. The Europeans held the advantage of ‘modernity’: not only weapons technology but the centralized organization of the modern state. Machiavelli’s lo stato had already overwhelmed the feudal structures of medieval Europe, and they would do the same to the tribal regimes of North America. Those “fringe outposts were pockets of dense military-technological power that could shape developments far beyond their borders,” especially with contagious diseases serving as their advance corps. Trading posts in Indian territories “made empires,” and although the Indians found this “laughable,” interpreting the existence of the posts as indicators of their own power and prestige, the reality turned out to be quite the opposite, in the fairly near term.
For their part, the Lakotas, the westernmost Sioux, prospered amongst the bison of the Great Plains, warring against the Indians already living on those lands. As early as the 1680s, war had broken out between the Lakotas and the Arikaras on the Missouri River. The Lakotas “were in the West, but the West was not theirs.” “Each spring they returned east to the precious prairie-forest ecotone where they could enjoy one of the best diets on the continent” while trading with the other Council Fires. They tempered their enjoyment with the knowledge “that this new world”—new not only to the Europeans but to themselves—was “an unforgiving place where people often were expiring if they were not expanding.” They determined to expand, still westward.
It was not entirely a matter of their own choice. The introduction of horses to the Great Plains proved indispensable to this movement. The Spanish had brought horses to the New World, thousands of years after they had perished here, along with the many other extinctions that occurred during the Pleistocene era. After the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest temporarily eradicated Spanish settlers in the 1680s, the horses came into the hands of several nomadic tribes, including the Comanche. The horse enabled “a new kind of nomadism, one that transcended human and canine power to carry things and did not require giving up all but the bare minimum of possessions,” “at once a hunting tool and a weapon, allowing its owner to both chase game and kill enemies more efficiently.” As horses moved northward, even as guns moved westward, converging on the Great Plains in a timely boon to Sioux ambitions. Having been excluded from a 1701 peace conference in Montreal, whereby the Iroquois and some three dozen other Amerindian nations settled their differences with the French, the Sioux felt betrayed by their erstwhile allies. For their part, the English, alarmed at the prospect of increased French control of North America and with their own intra-European disputes with their main rival, entered into a war with the French on both continents. “The West, including the Sioux country, became a sideshow.” The Sioux were forced out of their territory; what had been a policy of seasonal forays into the west became a permanent shift—or could so become, if the Lakota, the westernmost Council Fire, could manage their relations with the Omahas, Otoes, and other nations already settled on the Plains.
Having little to offer in trade, Lakotas resorted to warfare, centering on the river valleys of this arid region. “For Lakotas, river valleys were both havens and obstacles,” needed for survival but occupied by others. “This was the paradox of the grasslands: they were an immense reservoir of space and wealth that pinned people down” to “small ribbons of water and fertile earth.” “For the next half a century, well into the mid-eighteenth century, war would drive Lakota policy in the West,” as “Lakotas set out to conquer” the peoples that stood in their way in a “pitiless and protracted” struggle. Although their increased isolation from the other Council Fires interfered with coordinated foreign policy, each foothold in a river valley concentrated the Lakotas, enabling them to centralize politically and militarily; they did not have a modern state, but geography forced them to do by accident something of what statists in Europe had done as a matter of policy. Gradually, the fought and defeated not only the Otoes and the Omahas but the Poncas, Iowas, Suones, and Minneonjous. Refugees gathered in the Missouri River valley, perhaps as many as 50,000. In their newfound territories, the Lakotas “were feverishly trying to turn themselves into a true horse and gun powder” society, “but until they did, they would be dangerously exposed,” if their now-concentrated enemies allied against them.
To the east, the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 reconfigured the geopolitics of the Great Lakes. The British obtained recognized rights to rule the area around Hudson Bay and to rule the Iroquois. The lower Great Lakes and the Ohio valley became a free trade zone where Indians could trade with either empire. Alliances with Indians in other areas remained a matter for competition. France was especially concerned about the lower Great Lakes, which linked the core of their New World holdings with the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers. “Not only was Louisiana being severed from New France, but a door was opening for the Spaniards to ascend the Missouri and look for the Northwest Passage.” The Mesquakies, allies of the Sioux, occupied the area near Detroit; the French offered iron, guns, and military alliance to the Sioux, who abandoned their erstwhile friends, most of whom were then killed. The alliance did not lead to political integration, however, as the Sioux refused to conform to the way of life of the French and their Jesuit missionaries, insisting on the contrary that French settlers in Sioux territories “behave like, essentially to be, Sioux.”
The French had little choice but to comply, especially since they sought a bigger prize. The Peace of Utrecht had barred them and the British from the “Spanish Pacific,” setting off a quest for the imagined Northwest Passage to the ocean. “A continent-wide French belt could isolate the British in Hudson Bay, open access to Mexican silver, and force the Indians to privilege Frenc traders over all the others,” additionally “bring[ing] France closer to China and its riches,” turning “the comparatively modest colonies of New France and Louisiana into pivots of a globe-spanning French Empire.” In this, the Cree, one of the nations still unconquered by the Sioux in the West, would prove an obstacle—unless the French could negotiate an agreement between the two nations. When the French couldn’t persuade the Cree to desist in raiding Sioux lands, they “directed them to attack the Lakotas” in the West, “apparently not realizing that this would draw the French into a conflict with the most numerous of the Sioux divisions.” Indian slave trading by the French meanwhile “alienat[ed] the very people they were trying to win over.” The struggle that ensued resulted in the Lakotas blocking further French advances in the West and in Sioux expansion into the Missouri River valley. The refugees there had another thing they wanted, in addition to land: horses, with which they could fight the remaining Plains Indians, the most powerful among them being the Crows.
To the east, the Crows remained a formidable rival, one of their chiefs declaring that the Sioux “were only good to eat.” To prevent that eventuality, the Sioux held back from attacking the French, preferring to use them as a source of guns and iron. This was “an extraordinarily difficult thing for their chiefs to do,” given a regime whose way of life required “retaliation to restore spiritual and emotional balance” when families lost kin. But by 1742, the policy of restraint paid off; when the governor of New France called another conference in Montreal, he made sure to invite the Sioux, whose demands he met. “The momentum of historical change was now on the side of the Sioux.” When, two years later, the British blockaded the St. Lawrence River, injuring French trade with the Indians, the Sioux remained prudently quiet, and when the war ended in 1748 the French strengthened trade ties with them. The Sioux agreed to allow the French to build three fortified trading posts on their territory as a convenience to both partners. The principal French trading agent, Paul Marin, “became a passionate advocate of the Ochéti Šakówin’s territorial integrity,” inasmuch as any imperial land grab would interrupt trade and prevent exploration in search for the Northwest Passage. His colleagues in Paris agreed, since the British were making inroads in the Ohio Country, threatening to cut off the Canada-Mississippi corridor. “The Sioux alliance was essential for French efforts to reverse the momentum,” which soon led to the French and Indian War, spiraling into the Seven Years’ War in Europe. The war enabled the Sioux to strengthen their foothold in the Missouri River valley.
Hämäläinen pauses to admire Sioux powers of adaptation. Their “mythological hero,” Iktómi, is a shapeshifter. He wields the “rewarding and dangerous, unpredictable and uplifting” spiritual power to change course, including change political regimes, with changing circumstances. The Sioux conception of kinship as an ongoing regime change prevented them from thinking of families and clans as relatively fixed biologically-based entities; learn our language, accept our way of life, and you are one of us. “By the mid-eighteenth century the Sioux had shifted shape many times over.” They had forged an alliance with the radically alien French in the east while pushing into the Plains in the west. They now occupied nearly 100,000 acres of land, second only (among the North American Indians) to the territory controlled by the Comanche empire in the southern Plains. The Lakotas had shapeshifted more radically than any of the other Council Fires, becoming “the nomads and bison hunters of the prairie.” “Iktómi was guiding the Lakotas through a precarious metamorphosis, shifting shape with them in the vast new world in the West.” This, to the point of threatening their ties with the other Sioux: while the eastern Council Fires wanted peace with the Crees, the Lakotas attacked them as rival hunters. “Yet the Sioux endured as one people,” a “colossal force in the deep interior” of North America, precisely because they possessed their “startling malleability and ability to shift shape.” They ruled “a vast territory stretching from the upper Mississippi to the Missouri Valley” as “a central people who commanded attention and refused to be ignored.”
Disastrously for the Sioux, the French lost the war, and the 1763 Treaty of Paris ruined their empire in North America, dividing the continent into Spanish territories west of the Mississippi, British territories to the east—all ‘over the heads’ of the Indians. The Lakotas continued to push west, fighting Crows and Pawnees and discovering the valuable Black Hills in 1776. Now, it was the British who saw them as an ally “who could deliver interior Indians behind Britain,” even as the Sioux “saw in the British an ally who could deliver guns for a fight against common enemies.” American colonists’ successful revolt against the British Empire freed Lakotas from any status as British cat’s paws, and they continued to win victories in the West against the Mandans and Arikaras, forcing them to abandon ancestral homelands. They also added another trade system, the St. Louis-New Orleans corridor, to their existing ties with Hudson Bay and Montreal; in both areas, they dealt with foreign merchants backed by imperial powers, enhancing their status as “a major center of geopolitical power” on the continent. In this, Lakotas and Dakotas alike could pool their knowledge; “the seven fires accumulated an exceptionally broad understanding of North America’s imperial and Indigneous landscapes,” with a “360-degree panorama of the continent and its peoples.”
But a new empire now loomed. The 1783 treaty ending America’s War of Independence had granted the United States rule over the Ohio Valley, confining the British to Canada. Americans now “claimed vast tracts of Indian lands, which settlers were filling with such fervor that [George] Washington believed nothing ‘short of a Chinese wall’ could restrain them.” It should be observed that the U.S. federal government enjoyed nothing like the power over mass immigration it would later acquire (even more than two centuries later, that power remains unsteady). What is more, for European powers and their former colonists to redraw lines on the map was one thing, actual control another. The Mississippi “was the master key to the continent, feeding everything—people, ambitions, commerce, violence, power—toward the center,” a “trunkline of an enormous system of naturally navigable tributaries” connecting “1.5 million miles of the interior to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic circuits,” but it was hardly a secure boundary, especially since Spain, on its side “was an absentee landlord at best.” Recognizing this, the Spanish encouraged American settlement and trade in Louisiana, including the crucial city of New Orleans, hoping that they could make the emigrants “into loyal subjects who would defend Spanish Louisiana against other Americans.” In retrospect, the policy seems laughable, but at the time the Appalachian mountain range stood as a barrier to travel, threatening to split West from East, even as the slavery controversy nearly split South from North in the next century. The Spanish were counting on the United States remaining a country tethered economically to the Atlantic coast, with American emigrants tethered to the Gulf of Mexico.
As for the Lakotas, the Spanish considered them as the Americans of the north, potentially a buffer against encroachments on their territory from that direction. The Anglo-Spanish War of 1796 induced the British, in Canada, similarly to appeal to the Lakotas, hoping to send them down the Mississippi against the Spanish. The Spanish, controlling the Mississippi trade route, had the upper hand, however, and the Lakotas never invaded. “Lakotas needed the Spanish Empire to last.” Ally with the weakest; don’t ‘bandwagon’ with the strongest unless you have no realistic alternative: they understood this as well as any other people in the history of the world. “The late eighteenth-century Spanish Empire was weaker and more distracted than the French Empire had ever been, but if it survived, it could serve Lakotas well.”
But it couldn’t, and so it didn’t. France’s soon-to-be emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, retaliated against the rapprochement between the United States and Great Britain, solemnized in the 1793 Jay Treaty, by purchasing Louisiana from Spain. He hoped to retake the trans-Appalachian region, or at least turn those American states into French allies. This also gave him the chance to reestablish their rule in Saint Domingue, to which he sent an armada of 50,000 soldiers, “the largest naval invasion force ever to cross the Atlantic,” to overthrow the rebel government headed by the ex-slave, Toussaint Louverture, who had exterminated the French colony there. In exchange, the Spanish would have French troops and settlers as a buffer against American expansion. Although the Jefferson Administration detested the thought of French rule over Louisiana, it feared slave rebellion in its own southern states, and therefore supported the French assault in the Caribbean.
Foreshadowing the outcome of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions elsewhere, the ambitious plan collapsed in the face of yellow fever and Louverture’s army. Jefferson gave up on him, offered to take New Orleans off his hands (remarking to one correspondent that any foreign power controlling the port/chokepoint was ipso facto an enemy of the United States); knowing that the British still wanted to contain the United States to the eastern section of the continent, Bonaparte threw the rest of Louisiana into the bargain. “You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it,” the French negotiator, wily Talleyrand, accurately observed. Häkäläinen remarks that the Indians of the Louisiana territory thought it all “ludicrous,” but they proved mistaken, as American settlers overwhelmed them in a generation. Events in the South foreshadowed events elsewhere.
For now, however, the Lakotas prospered. They “seemed to be everywhere in the upper Missouri country, trading, parleying, raiding, dancing,” “carrying countless men, women and children into captivity” as they sought to assimilate nearby nations. “Unable to contain Lakotas, smaller groups sought protection under their auspices.” The Lakotas had “shifted shape once again, now bending to the contours of the river that bestowed them with unprecedented power.” One important chief intoned, “We are seven bands and from now on we will scatter over the world, so we will appoint one chief for each band,” an ambition Häkäläinen is pleased to call “a distinctive intermesh of the sublime and the practical in the Lakota way of being.” A less charitable soul might call it a distinctive intermesh of the sublime and the ridiculous, but it would not have seemed so at the time, to the Lakotas and those they had conquered.
President Jefferson was not done with continental expansion, sending Mssrs. Lewis and Clark on their expedition into northwest in 1804. “They were to inspect the flora and fauna” (very much in line with Jefferson’s scientific interests), “pioneer an all-water passage to the Pacific” (the dream of the Northwest Passage died hard), “end British dominance of the inland trade” (Jefferson’s Democrats had come to dominate national politics partly on anti-British sentiment), “harness the Missouri for U.S. commerce” (as part of the Mississippi-centered riverine system he had just acquired), “and project U.S. sovereignty into the West” (lest the continent continue to be a cockpit of warring nations, as it had been for millennia and as Europe would continue to be). Jefferson wanted friendship with the Indians, but under American sovereignty; the struggle for regime change was on.
More immediately, as he recognized, Lewis and Clark “must stand well” with the Sioux and the still-powerful Osages, “because in their quarter we are miserably weak”. But make no mistake, “Lewis and Clark were harbingers of empire”—specifically, what Jefferson called “the empire of liberty,” what Häkäläinen describes as “a new rational order [that] could be inscribed through a new science of remaking people and worlds”—James Madison’s “new science of politics” in tandem with the new, experimental science of Francis Bacon. “Jefferson, a republican purist who loathed the idea of a robust federal government, had launched a massive projection of state power into the North American West to mold its people into his model of an enlightened man—such was the hold of the Louisiana Territory on his imagination.” More precisely, such was the hold of the republican politics of the American branch of the Enlightenment on his mind. He was quite willing to see the future states of Louisiana and, by extension, the northwest territory, break off from the federal government, so long as they were organized as republican regimes that would maintain peace with the Mother Country.
“Without fully realizing it, Lewis and Clark had stepped into a dynamic Indigenous world where power rested on rivalry,” as indeed power so often does. Such rivalry persisted not only between Lakotas and the other nations but within the Lakota regime itself, as in “times of crisis the entire Lakota society could realign around new political coordinates.” The explorers recognized one tribal chief at the expense of another, inadvertently ruining prospects of trade with a tribe that already enjoyed a solid place in the St. Louis commercial system. They thus took the slighted tribe as a barrier to their expedition, and were saved only by the Arikara nation, which wanted to get out from under Lakota dominance. An Arikara chief made it clear that “if Americans wanted peace and trade to flourish along the Missouri, they would have to first contain the Lakotas.” For their part, the Lakotas saw that an alliance among the Americans, the Arikaras, and the neighboring Mandans and Hidatsas might indeed contain them, and they wanted none of that. By building Fort Mandan, Americans “won entry into the greatest trading citadel of the northern Great Plains.” “Lewis and Clark wanted the Mandan trade for the United States, and to have it they needed Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras to form an alliance—and denounce the Lakotas.” As the Lakotas responded by tightening their hold on the Missouri Valley, the two rival empires readied themselves for conflict. Lakotas “welcomed America’s merchandise but not its paternal embrace; they had accepted the Americans as traders and potential allies,” initially, “but not as their sovereigns.” Indeed, “no Indian nation had done more to undermine the Jeffersonian vision than Lakotas.” Lewis and Clark completed their expedition, having “learned much more about the flora and fauna” of the region “than about Lakotas who remained a specter-like menace to them,” misunderstanding their new rivals as “an organizationally shallow robber regime that preyed on weaker, less mobile, and less capacious people who lacked their propensity for swift violence.” They did in fact so prey, but organizationally shallow they were not. They were an empire, not an empire of liberty in the natural-rights sense but an empire securing independence from other empires and of rule over the small. “Lakotas had transformed the Missouri’s longitudinal section into an imperial valley through diplomacy, persuasion, and raw military force. Almost all the people Lewis and Clark tried to win over were already in Lakota orbit as allies or dependents. Instead of delivering Native peoples into the U.S. fold, Lewis and Clark muddled through the Lakota Meridian as also-rans.” After they departed, the Lakotas treated with the Blackfoot Confederacy on their ever-flexible western boundary, beginning a shift towards “the vast animal-rich plains around them,” far beyond their imperial core.
They also made overtures to the British in Canada, offering an alliance to “confront the new white nation now encroaching on Our Lands,” as one chief put it. Americans countered with the Zebulon Pike expedition, which went up the Mississippi River in order to find its source, to “clear British traders from the area, and negotiate land sales with Indians.” Pike didn’t find the source of the Mississippi, but he did find the other main Sioux Council Fire, the Dakotas, who hunted for British markets and fought with the Chippewas over beaver trapping stakes. Dividing in order someday to rule, Pike allied with the Mdewakantons, a subset of the Dakotas, built a fort, promising a trading post nearby, and established U.S. sovereignty to his satisfaction. Americans would soon find that fur traders were welcome, U.S. government forces not so much. The Lakotas continued to consolidate and extend their own empire, under their own regime.
In the War of 1812, the Dakotas allied with the British, their trading partners, while the Lakotas remained neutral, taking care not to ride the wrong horse. As it happened, “Britain would never again seriously interfere with American ambitions of continental expansion.” Lakota prudence enabled them to resume their empire-building as soon as the war was over, fighting the Crows in the west, negotiating with Pawnees and Kiowas in the south, and keeping watch on the formidable Comanches, horse-warriors whose nomad-imperialism resembled their own. The Lakotas still “did not feel safe out in the open,” but they continued to foster their horse herds while envying the Crows and Cheyennes, who used the Black Hills in the same way the Lakotas used the Missouri Valley, as a safe hub for expansion into the plains.
Not to be outdone on the diplomatic front, Americans invited the western Indians to a parley at a site just north of St. Louis in the summer of 1815. There, they made treaties with six nations, including the Lakotas, making them all American protectorates. Or so the Americans supposed. The Sioux delegates “probably” understood the treaty “as a confirmation of the prewar status quo whereby Americans traded with them without dictating to them.” The United States established Pike-founded Fort Snelling along what is now the Minnesota River as their military and economic hub. This redounded to the economic benefit of the Lakotas, as settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee came into the lower Missouri Valley, displacing the Osage traders there and inadvertently pushing Amerindian commerce upriver, “delivering a bonanza for Lakotas,” as American fur companies competed with each other for their trade. This enrichment better armed them to fight Crows and Hidatsas, and by 1832 the Lakotas had eliminated the Arikaras from the upper Missouri. A further boon from the Americans came that year, the smallpox vaccine, which Congress had ordered to be distributed among the Indians to save them (in the words of the legislation) from “the destructive ravages of that disease.” This further detached the Sioux from British traders and agents, and it enabled them to maintain their population at approximately 20,000, while more westerly tribes declined in the wake of the epidemic.
More ominously from the Lakota perspective, Americans also built Fort Pierre in 1831, after a flood had shifted the channel of the Missouri River. It would later become the capital of the state of South Dakota.
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