Great Plains, America

## Area Overview

The **Great Plains** (French: *Grandes Plaines*), sometimes simply "**the Plains**", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located just to the east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. It is the southern and main part of the Interior Plains, which also include the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. Great Plains or **Western Plains** is also used to describe the ecoregion of the Great Plains, or alternatively the western portion of the Great Plains.

The Great Plains lies across both Central United States and Western Canada, encompassing:

* Most or all of the U.S. states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota;
* Parts of the U.S. states of Colorado,  Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming;
* Sometimes parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri;
* The southern portions of the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

The term "Great Plains" usually refers specifically to the United States portion of the ecozone while the Canadian portion is known as the Canadian Prairies.

Grasslands are among the least protected biomes with vast areas having been converted for agricultural purposes and pastures.

## History (P)

### Original American contact

The first Peoples (Paleo-Indians) arrived on the Great Plains thousands of years ago. Historically, the Great Plains were the range of the Blackfoot, Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and others. The introduction of corn around 800 CE allowed the development of the mound-building Mississippian culture along rivers that crossed the Great Plains and that included trade networks west to the Rocky Mountains. Mississippians settled the Great Plains at sites now in Oklahoma and South Dakota. After 1750, warfare and pressure from the Blackfoot, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho pushed Eastern Shoshone south and westward. Some of them moved as far south as Texas, emerging as the Comanche by 1700.

#### Arrival of horses

The first known contact between Europeans and Indians in the Great Plains occurred in what is now Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska from 1540 to 1542 with the arrival of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a Spanish conquistador. In that same period, Hernando de Soto crossed a west-northwest direction in what is now Oklahoma and Texas which is now known as the De Soto Trail. The Spanish thought that the Great Plains were the location of the mythological *Quivira and Cíbola*, a place said to be rich in gold.

The real beginning of the horse culture of the plains began with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico and the capture of thousands of horses and other livestock. In 1683 a Spanish expedition into Texas found horses among Native people. In 1690, a few horses were found by the Spanish among the Indians living at the mouth of the Colorado River of Texas and the Caddo of eastern Texas had a sizeable number.

The French explorer Claude Charles Du Tisne found 300 horses among the Wichita on the Verdigris River in 1719, but they were still not plentiful. By 1770, that Plains Indians culture was mature, consisting of mounted buffalo-hunting nomads from Saskatchewan and Alberta southward nearly to the Rio Grande. The milder winters of the southern Plains favored a pastoral economy by the Indians.

Comanche power peaked in the 1840s when they conducted large-scale raids hundreds of miles into Mexico proper, while also warring against the Anglo-Americans and Tejanos who had settled in independent Texas.

#### Fur trade

The fur trade brought thousands of colonial settlers into the Great Plains over the next 100 years. Fur trappers made their way across much of the region, making regular contacts with Indians.

The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) had first been granted in 1670 a commercial monopoly over the huge Hudson Bay drainage area known as Rupert's Land covering a northern portion of the Great Plains. The North West Company fur trade incumbent had also been present in the area until acquired by the HBC during the early 1820s.

### 1719: French Trappers Massacre in Prey

In 1719 a French Trapper expedition was found slaughtered in the area, all of whom had been severely injured before death. Some Comanche Hunters were found killed nearby as well, and the incident has gone unsolved as to what entity could have murdered the Trappers and Comanche. Popular theory is that the Comanche attacked the trappers, but the assault did not co-align with typical Comanche attacks.

The United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and conducted the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804–1806, and more information became available concerning the Plains, and various pioneers entered the areas. Fur trading posts were often the basis of later settlements. Through the 19th century, more settlers migrated to the Great Plains as part of a vast westward expansion of population, and new settlements became dotted across the Great Plains.[*citation needed*]

The settlers also brought diseases against which the Indians had no resistance. Between a half and two-thirds of the Plains Indians are thought to have died of smallpox by the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic spread across the Great Plains, killing many thousands between 1837 and 1840. In the end, it is estimated that two-thirds of the Blackfoot population died, along with half of the Assiniboines and Arikaras, a third of the Crows, and a quarter of the Pawnees.