The Great Plains, sometimes referred to as the Great American Desert, was teeming with life in the century after 1750. Before 1750, only limited numbers of Native Americans had ventured onto its vast open spaces, but the introduction of the horse in the late 17th century from New Mexico allowed many Indians to alter their culture and pursue the huge herds of buffalo that wandered the region. The Comanche trekked onto the Great Plains from the Great Basin area in eastern Utah, and the Sioux moved in from the east and the prairies of Minnesota. This transformation took decades to develop, but by the second half of the 18th century, these and other tribes had created the elaborate Plains Indian culture that was largely dependent on the horse for mobility and the buffalo for almost everything else.

There were several key characteristics of this culture: First, tribal ties grew looser since there was less need for cooperation in a nomadic lifestyle; agriculture had required greater group organization for labor and for protection. Second, the gender division of labor changed. Women had previously been the primary producers of nourishment by gathering food and growing crops, but now their labor focused on dressing meats and tanning hides. With this shift also came some diminution of the status of women within the tribe. Finally, the Plains Indians developed extensive trade networks that reached from New Mexico and the Rio Grande to Hudson's Bay in Canada, and from beyond the Rockies to the European Americans living along the Atlantic Ocean.

There were also important shifts in the balance of power in this period. The Comanche drove the Apache into the deserts of the Southwest. Further north, the sedentary tribes of the Mandan and Hidatsa, visited during the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-06), had been vital as trading centers around 1800 but soon lost ground as they were devastated by disease and epidemics. Because of their dispersed conditions, the mobile Plains Indians suffered less from disease at this time. Europeans also claimed the Great Plains as French fur traders traveled throughout the area in the late 18th century. Spain held title to most of the plains after 1763 but did not colonize the region beyond southern Texas and the Mississippi outposts established by the French. Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase (1803), in which the United States acquired the vast territory of Louisiana, explorers such as Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Montgomery Pike crossed the Great Plains, and fur trading penetrated into the Rockies, but American settlement of the Great Plains would have to wait until later in the 19th century.

Bibliography:

1) Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999);

2) Andrew C. Isenberg, The Devastation of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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