to be pitied, corrected, and helped.
Three corrective tropes are emerging to open up and reenergize such dead-end discussions. The first of these is the longue durée, recognizing that our conventional conceptions of regional agricultural history derive from the relatively brief experiences of Euro-American agriculturalists. What is required is to go deeper in time, at the same time enlarging the definition of just what constitutes agriculture. The second corrective is to embrace complexity, allowing not merely multiple causes but interdependent causes for emergences in the field. The third corrective is to recognize agency in the historical actors of Great Plains agriculture, to upend the assumption that environment or economics or any other disembodied factor determines developments and to make human agents the protagonists of agricultural history. An agricultural history constructed along these lines promises to retire the subject of Great Plains agriculture as an impoverished problem and redefine it as a rich narrative—thereby, too, enabling a constructive sense of place and identity among regional agriculturalists.
Among the Hidatsa people, farmers for centuries in the upper Missouri River Valley on the northern plains, women controlled the agricultural agenda and did the field work. During the growing season, detachments of girls and young women ascended adukati’, platforms erected among the corn, beans, and sunflowers, to keep watch over the crops, scaring away birds and driving off boys who were likely to pilfer the green corn. “You bad boys, you are all alike,” they would sing, but they also sang songs to the corn, because the corn responded to them and thrived. To read of the agricultural practices of the Hidatsa is to be reminded of several pertinent facts in the agricultural history of the Great Plains: that American Indians were the first farmers of the plains; that although anthropologists chose to label as “Plains” those native cultures characterized by keeping horses and hunting bison, there were other indigenous ways of life perhaps better suited to the region for the long term; that agriculture need not be a male-dominant pursuit, as it was for most Euro-Americans; and that the Great Plains need not be considered a hostile environment. To the Hidatsa and the other village farming peoples of the plains, they were a comfort landscape, even kin, a mother.
The classic narrative of village farmer lifeways began its life in print as Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians: An Indian Interpretation, a title befitting an anthropological treatise, but was later retitled Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, a title recognizing the agency of the teller of the story instead of its recorder (Wilson 1917, 1987). Maxidiwiac, Buffalo Bird Woman, gave her remembrances and wisdom to the clergyman-scholar Wilson during the years 1906–1918, when she and some others still persisted in many traditional practices. It was a fruitful partnership that revealed not only the rich culture of the Hidatsa but also the impressive expertise and productivity of their agriculture. The crop cultures described by Maxidiwiac possessed a material toolkit in which the bison-scapula hoe, often stashed under the sleeping platform of an older woman, figured prominently. They also demonstrated a good grasp of environmental conditions, from soils to climate; recognized the virtues of diverse genetics in crop varieties; devised ingenious methods of production and preservation; and involved the entire community in the food system.
The agricultural prowess of the Hidatsa, along with their neighbor peoples on the upper Missouri, the Mandan and Arikara, attracted the attention of the pioneer seedsman, Oscar Will of Bismarck, North Dakota, who appropriated their crop varieties for his seed catalogs. His son, George F. Will, not only joined in the family business but also was something of a renaissance man who did archeological and anthropological work and was the lead author of Corn among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (Will and Hyde 1917). Will focuses his descriptive work on the farming cultures of “the agricultural tribes” as distinct from “the hunter tribes.” He concludes with a chapter on “Varieties” including an eighteen-page register of those possessed by the individual tribes. For a seedsman, this was an homage as well as a reference.
The narrative documentation on the village farming peoples of the central and southern plains is not so impressive, but archaeological work fills the deficit, especially that of Waldo R. Wedel—who, being Mennonite himself, and thus representative of another prairie culture with strong agricultural values, paid close attention to agriculture among the peoples who figured in his excavations (Wedel 1941, 1947, 1986). His early work on the Quiviran peoples (ancestral to the Wichita) encountered by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in 1541 establishes them as accomplished and prosperous agriculturalists on the central plains. His later work on the Republican River Valley reaches back to the early big game hunters of the Pleistocene but waxes warm with the advent of the Central Plains Tradition of village farmers. “On present evidence,” Wedel writes, “crop growing as a major or primary subsistence activity seems to have appeared in the central plains about the time of the Neo-Atlantic climatic episode, which is radiocarbon dated at ca. A.D. 700–1100” (Wedel 1986). He also credits, however, “the extensive use of bison meat” which “offset the nutritional deficiencies of maize.” Thus, Wedel perceives in what he calls “prehistory” the practice of a diversified food base, combining both crop husbandry and animal resources—exactly what in his own time would be lauded by agriculturalists as the virtues of diversified farming. Wedel also perceives, in the longue durée, the responsiveness of native peoples to the opportunities and constraints of environment. They came and went, prospered and declined, according to changing climatic conditions.
Neither Wedel nor Preston Holder, the scholar who makes the general case for the significance of the village farmers on the plains, ever overcame the tendency to refer to the husbandry of their subjects as “horticulture,” a usage that diminishes its gravity—perhaps because the cultivation was done by women. What Holder says of the Caddoan peoples who are his focus in The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains applies equally to all the village farming peoples of the region—the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Pawnee, Wichita, Omaha, Ponca, Kansa, Osage, and others. “Society stood tied to the earth,” he writes. “Corn was its protector. The fields of the river bottoms were its insurance in the face of a difficult environment. The labor of the village and the rewards of life were focused in these fields. The whole was woven into a fabric which continued through time.” Holder observes that the village farmers eventually were swamped by invasive native equestrians and Euro-American farmers. Elizabeth Fenn’s work on the Mandan (Fenn 2014) suggests that epidemic disease was more destructive to sedentary peoples than warfare. The village farming way of life was more persistent than the nomadic equestrian.
To juxtapose the two in contrast, however, may be misleading. It also propounds an outdated conception of equestrian bison-hunters as living off the land rather than engaging in labor and husbandry. Recent major studies (West 1998; Hämäläinen 2009 ) of equestrian bison-hunting peoples lay the basis for an argument that they were, in fact, pastoral peoples engaged in animal husbandry. The Cheyenne and Comanche in the heyday of bison-hunting, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, accumulated and maintained horse herds so large that they placed destructive stress on the riverine corridors of the plains, thereby eroding their own resource base. Moreover, horses and their needs were, as Elliot West says, “complicated.” A horse had specific nutritional needs. “On this point a horse’s appeal became a hindrance; its hugely increased power came from a vastly greater hunger for energy, a craving Indians had to meet if they hoped to reap the benefits,” observes the historian. “An owner had to learn, understand, and respect an animal’s complicated needs if his breathing, eating tools were to do what was asked of them.” This sounds like a definition of animal husbandry—which is agriculture, and a sophisticated form thereof, too. No wonder that, as Peter Iverson has described (Iverson 1994), Plains Indians in the reservation period would take readily to handling cattle from horseback. Taking care of herbivores was in their lineage.
In the reservation era the Indian history of both crop and animal husbandry is checkered. Allotment of reservation land both took away the larger part of reservation lands and broke tribal control of remaining lands into individual parcels. On some reservations natives engaged in cattle raising, but agents often were not supportive of this, for they considered animal husbandry insufficiently civilizing. Boarding schools emphasized agriculture for Indian boys, and some individual Indians became proficient farmers,
