Native American (Indian) Traders

I thought even children understood "cowboys and Indians." 

Then I began to ponder that thought.  No.  No, as a matter of fact, no, I don't think that.  I grew up with a WHOLE bunch of TV shows about cowboys and Indians:  Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Wanted: Dead or Alive, The Rifleman, Maverick, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Daniel Boone, High Chaparral, Little House on the Prairie ... just to name a few off of the top of my head!  My grandfather is even part Native American.  MY generation has "known" about Indians all our lives.

But, today's children?  Na-da.  There are not hardly even any movies about cowboys and Indians.  I wonder if I could get my grandchildren to write down for me everything they "know" about Indians...  Probably not.  I don't think I could even get my children to do that for me.  But I suspect I have forgotten more about Indians than they know!   By the next generation, cowboys and Indians may be more myth than reality.  How heart-breaking.

Since I decided to start this blog for my children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, I guess I should ... what? share my fascination with Indians?  Yuppers!!

Ever wonder what Indians did for money?  Nothing. They didn't buy and sell things like Europeans did.  They were traders, barter-ers.  What's really interesting though is that they didn't trade "even-Steven."  They were really good businessmen; they always wanted to accomplish a 100% "profit."  Interesting, huh?

Before Europeans showed up, the Mandan and Hidatsa traded with the Cree, the Assiniboin, Crow and Cheyenne.  They all lived off of the land, but they all specialized in different things.  The hunter tribes traded furs (for the desperately cold North Dakota winters) and dried meat with the gatherer tribes for corn, beans, and other agricultural crops.  The plains Indians would trade hides with forest Indians for dried fish.

In this way, trade goods made their way across the continent east to west and west to east. Archeologists working Native American sites in North Dakota have uncovered seashells from both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico.  Conversely, flint (crucial for making fires) from the Dakotas has been found in Canada, Pennsylvania and Colorado.

The Indians were smart traders with an eye to the future.  They might trade with one tribe for things they would rarely use, knowing that there was another tribe on their other geographical side that would trade handsomely for things they would use.  That's how they made their "profit."

The Europeans introduced horses, beads and metal into the trade cycles.  It seems that, no matter how metal came to them (guns, sheet iron or whatever), the Indians reshaped it into arrowheads or tools for processing their hides.  It makes sense.  What good was a gun with no bullets or gunpowder?  But an Indian could fire off arrows faster than Europeans could fire - reload - fire their guns.  Indians, rightly so, found arrowheads much more valuable that guns!  The hunter Indians wanted to shape tomahawks and axes, too.  Once, as the story goes, a Mandan was given a metal corn mill for grinding their grain.  The European thought it a wonderful gift because the Indians ground their corn by crushing it between two rocks.  Sometimes the rocks would end up getting ground into the corn, too, causing chipped teeth.  The Mandan studied that corn mill for awhile, then he broke it into pieces and fitted the small ones onto the end of arrows for arrowheads and used a bigger piece to shatter bones to pieces and get at the marrow!  Beauty is in the eye of beholder, eh?

So, kids, did you know all of that?  Did you know that my great-grandparents (your great-great- great grandparents) were half Indian?