6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. IO7 



towns in the lower Loup district of east-central Nebraska, many of 

 the Arikara, Middle Period Mandan, and Hidatsa settlements of the 

 upper Missouri, and, we may suppose, some of the sites of the Chey- 

 enne and other formerly sedentary tribes east of the upper Missouri. 

 Introduction of the horse, arrival in the Missouri drainage of easterly 

 groups such as the Oneota with new cultural elements, and the for- 

 mation through necessity or choice of large community populations 

 (pi. 2, fig. 2) all gave impetus to a rather remarkable florescence of 

 culture. In the southwestern portions of the watershed dwelt a num- 

 ber of vaguely described and little-known peoples, partly hunters and 

 partly tillers of the soil, who were possibly Apache ; their hold on the 

 region seems to have been a feeble one, and their interests were ap- 

 parently southwestern rather than with the village tribes of the east- 

 ern plains. During the late 1700's and early iSoo's, increasing pres- 

 sure from the whites on the east, the introduction of smallpox and 

 other devastating diseases, and above all the swarming in from all sides 

 of tribes who committed themselves solely to raiding and the chase, 

 reduced the once culturally important village tribes to a relatively in- 

 significant role. 



As the very brief and incomplete foregoing resume suggests, there 

 is a fairly well outlined sequence of native cultures for a large part 

 of the Missouri Basin. There are strong suggestions that the increas- 

 ingly sedentary nature and larger communities of the later occupations 

 went hand in hand with improved domestic food plants, better agri- 

 cultural methods, and greater crop yields. In short, for the eastern 

 half of the region the story appears to be one of progressively better 

 adaptations on man's part to a rather variable and uncertain habitat. 

 It should be emphasized that at the moment it is the village tribes of 

 the arable eastern plains whose antecedents seem best known, but 

 even here there are great gaps in our knowledge. It is not at all clear 

 for example, what the relationship was between the various recognized 

 prehistoric corn-growing peoples and such historic tribes as the Paw- 

 nee, Arikara, Mandan, and their contemporaries. A whole host of 

 problems presents itself in the shifting emphasis from hunting to 

 corn cultivation and back to hunting, as evidenced in the still sketchy 

 archeological record ; in the transformation from small, scattered, 

 loosely organized villages of a few dozen inhabitants to great, forti- 

 fied towns of several thousand souls ; and in the economic, social, and 

 political readjustments that certainly arose from the constantly chang- 

 ing native ways of living. In the semiarid western sections of the 

 Basin, notably Montana and Wyoming, the data on prehistory are 

 infinitely more scattered, fragmentary, and unorganized. 



