page_title: Arikara
section_title: History up to 1900
hierarchical_section_title: Arikara / History up to 1900
caption_attribution_description: English: Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan Indian territory, 1851. Like-a-Fishhook Village, Fort Berthold I and II and militay post Fort Buford, North Dakota
context_page_description: Arikara, also known as Sahnish, Arikaree, Ree, or Hundi, are a tribe of Native Americans in North Dakota. Today, they are enrolled with the Mandan and the Hidatsa as the federally recognized tribe known as the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.
context_section_description: The goal of the United States in the Laramie Treaty of 1851 was to establish a permanent peace on most of the northern plains and to define tribal territories. The basic treaty area of the Arikara, the Hidatsa and the Mandan was a mutual territory north of Heart River, encircled on the east and north by the Missouri and on the west by Yellowstone River down to the mouth of Powder River. The Lakota had continued to press north after 1823, so they got treaty rights on the area along Grand River as well as other land south of Heart River.
  Peace was short-lived. As drawings collected by W. J. Hoffman of Hunkpapa Chief Running Antelope showed, in 1853 he already had killed four Arikara Indians. The next year the Three Tribes called for the U. S. Army to intervene; that request was repeated the next two decades.
  Arikara hunters were waylaid and had difficulties securing enough game and hides. A lengthy battle between an Arikara camp on hunt and several hundred Lakota took place in June 1858. The Arikara camp lost ten men, with 34 wounded.
  The Arikara built Star Village in the spring of 1862. They had to abandon it after a fierce fight with the Sioux a few months later. The Arikara crossed the Missouri and built new earth lodges and log houses near the common Mandan and Hidatsa village Like-a-Fishhook Village. The village was built outside the Three Tribes treaty area. "We, the Arikara, have been driven from our country on the other side of the Missouri River by the Sioux", declared chief White Shield in 1864.
  Like a Fishhook Village was not safe from devastation, strikes or raids for horses (and neither was the nearby trading post Fort Berthold II). Just before the end of 1862, some Sioux burned a part of the village. The affiliation of the Sioux is not always clear: Lakota, Yanktonai and "refugee" Santee Sioux from the Minnesota uprising sometimes attacked the Three Tribes. As always in intertribal warfare, there were interludes with peace - and conflicts with other Indian foes, as for example the Assiniboine.
  In 1869, the Three Tribes asked the United States for guns as protection against hostile Sioux, and they finally received 300 pieces.
  The Three Tribes sold a part of their southern treaty land, more or less already annexed by the Lakota, to the United States on April 12, 1870. At the same time, they got treaty on the area where Like a Fishhook Village was located.
  In June 1874, Colonel George Armstrong Custer in Fort Abraham Lincoln (now North Dakota) received an order to delay his Black Hills Expedition and stop a large war party of Lakota on its way to attack Like a Fishhook Village. "The Rees and Mandans should be protected same as white settlers", read the order from General Phil Sheridan. Custer failed and the Lakota killed five Arikara and one Mandan.
  The Arikara "supplied some of the most faithful and effective Indian scouts" for the Army during the war against the bands of Lakota roaming other peoples' territories in 1876-1877. "For tribes subject to Sioux pressure for decades, the combination of revenge and self-defense would constitute a powerful motivation" for joining the whites in actions like that. Custer's favorite scout, an Arikara known as Bloody Knife, fell during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian Reservation (now Montana) in 1876.
  "Mandans, Arickarees and Gros Ventres" were among the first Indian children to arrive at Hampton Institute, a historically black college, in Virginia for schooling, in 1878.
  The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation got a new shape and size by agreement in 1886 (ratified in 1891). In 1910, the Three Tribes gave their consent to sale of land, so the reservation was reduced once more. The Arikara drifted away from Like a Fishhook Village. They raised and branded cattle instead of hunting buffalo. With the Dawes Act and "allotment in severalty" passed as another attempt at assimilation to European-American culture, each Arikara family was allotted a homestead of 160 acres in the early 1890s. The Arikara Indians were considered citizens of the United States—and no m
caption: Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan Indian territory, 1851. Like-a-Fishhook Village, Fort Berthold I and II and military post Fort Buford, North Dakota.
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