NO. lO NEBRASKA ARCHEOLOGY STRONG II 



diverted from horticulture to buffalo hunting as a primary means 

 of subsistence, and these included many bordering peoples that now 

 swept into the true plains for the first time. So completely did the 

 horse enter into and modify the scheme of Plains Indian life that not 

 only the later explorers but also many of the ethnologists who came 

 after them have envisioned this type of life as being ancient 

 and universal in the region rather than a comparatively recent 

 development. 



With the fully recorded expeditions after 1804 of Lewis and Clark, 

 Zebulon Pike, Major Long, and other American army ofificers and 

 scientific observers comes the well illuminated climax of the play. 

 With or shortly after these men came educated travelers like Bracken- 

 ridge, Irving, and Prince Maximilian of Wied, naturalists like Nuttall 

 and Bradbury, and artists such as Bodmer, Catlin, Eastman, and Kurz. 

 In their accounts and pictures, the full historic culture of the Plains 

 is revealed for the first time, with its special emphasis on buffalo 

 hunting and its cult of warfare. Contrasted with the fragmentary 

 records of the Spanish and French, these later descriptions are strik- 

 inglv full and vivid and it is not remarkable that the picture of 

 the Plains Indiana as they were during the first three-quarters of the 

 nineteenth century should eclipse all others in the popular and even 

 in the scientific mind. Nevertheless, the student of human history 

 in the Plains region, in the light of the scant earlier records, must bear 

 in mind the fact that this last period was one of cultural degeneration 

 for many of the tribes concerned. 



The establishment of reservations from about 1855 on, the ex- 

 tinction of buffalo on the Plains, and the grim record of the Indian 

 wars mark the tragic finale of the old Indian life. Perhaps we are 

 still too close to these events and too conscious of the Indian as he 

 exists today on so many reservations to appreciate fully the tre- 

 mendous dramatic possibilities revealed in these closing scenes. To 

 one who has known or who can visualize the Plains Indian of the 

 recent past it would seem that the epic qualities of that hopeless but 

 gallant fight against overwhelming odds have as yet been barely 

 touched upon. Less dramatic than the Indian wars perhaps, but more 

 important, there still remains the baffling problem of acculturation 

 whereby this virile addition to the modern American stock may be 

 fitted into that culture which so ruthlessly, however inevitably, sup- 

 planted the colorful life of the old buffalo plains. Such in broadest 

 sweep is the recorded Indian history in the major area with which we 

 are concerned. 



