page_title: Kiowa
section_title: Early history and migration south
hierarchical_section_title: Kiowa / History / Early history and migration south
context_page_description: Kiowa people are a Native American tribe and an indigenous people of the Great Plains of the US. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries, and finally into the Southern Plains by the early 19th century. In 1867, the Kiowa were moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma.
  Today, they are federally recognized as Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma with headquarters in Carnegie, Oklahoma. As of 2011, there were 12,000 members. The Kiowa language, part of the Tanoan language family, is still spoken today.
context_section_description: The Kiowa emerged as a distinct people in their original homeland of the northern Missouri River Basin. Searching for more lands of their own, the Kiowa traveled southeast to the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota and Wyoming around 1650. In the Black Hills region, the Kiowa lived peacefully alongside the Crow Indians, with whom they long maintained a close friendship, organized themselves into 10 bands, and numbered around 3000. Pressure from the Ojibwe in the north woods and edge of the great plains in Minnesota forced the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and later the Sioux westward into Kiowa territory around the Black Hills. The Kiowa were pushed south by the invading Cheyenne who were then pushed westward out of the Black Hills by the Sioux. Eventually the Kiowa obtained a vast territory on the central and southern great plains in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, most of Oklahoma including the panhandle, and the Llano Estacado in the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico. In their early history, the Kiowa traveled with dogs pulling their belongings until horses were obtained through trade and raid with the Spanish and other Indian nations in the southwest.
  In the early spring of 1790 at the place that would become Las Vegas, New Mexico, a Kiowa party led by war leader Guikate, made an offer of peace to a Comanche party while both were visiting the home of a mutual friend of both tribes. This led to a later meeting between Guikate and the head chief of the Nokoni Comanche. The two groups made an alliance to share the same hunting grounds and entered into a mutual defense pact and became the dominant inhabitants of the Southern Plains. From that time on, the Comanche and Kiowa hunted, traveled, and made war together. In addition to the Comanche, the Kiowa formed a very close alliance with the Plains Apache (Kiowa-Apache), with the two nations sharing much of the same culture and participating in each other's annual council meetings and events. The strong alliance of southern plains nations kept the invading Spanish from gaining a strong colonial hold on the southern plains and eventually forced them completely out of the area, pushing them eastward and south past the Rio Grande into present day Mexico.
caption: Red sandstone cliffs in the Black Hills Wyoming, former Kiowa territory which remains a sacred area to them in modern times.
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