The Arikara: Lords of the Missouri

Long before any European ever glimpsed the Great Plains, the people who called themselves the Sahnish, known to outsiders as the Arikara, commanded the Missouri River like a continental highway. By the early seventeen hundreds, an estimated thirty thousand Arikara lived in more than thirty fortified earthlodge villages strung along the river for a hundred miles in each direction from where you are standing now. They were farmers and traders as much as hunters, growing corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers in the rich floodplain soil, then trading the surplus to nomadic peoples across the plains.

The Arikara were powerful enough that European traders needed their permission to move goods up the Missouri. But the eighteenth century turned catastrophic. Smallpox, carried inland along trade routes, swept through their villages repeatedly. An epidemic in seventeen eighty-one alone killed so many people that thirty-two distinct villages collapsed into just two or three survivors. By the time the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived in eighteen oh four, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands had been reduced to roughly six thousand people. Contemporary observers noted Arikara villages that had been abandoned so recently that the earthlodge roofs had not yet caved in.

At the same time, the Lakota, themselves displaced westward out of Minnesota by the Ojibwe, were pressing hard onto the plains and onto the Missouri. The two peoples collided here. The Lakota were mobile, militarized, and expanding; the Arikara were sedentary and weakened. Decades of raiding followed. The Arikara eventually retreated north. Their descendants live today as part of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, still remembering the villages they held along this reach of the Missouri for centuries.