TRANSPORTATION
Although transportation has played a vital role in the history of every American region, it has been especially important in the Great Plains. Having few navigable bodies of water and limited overland roads, the region desperately needed a replacement technology for the river steamboat and the covered wagon and benefited enormously from the appearance of the “iron horse.” The Railroad Age solved most of the Great Plains’s chronic transport problems and gave the region some of its distinctive characteristics. The thousands of communities spawned and nurtured by the rails often sported a flavor of standardization that the later network of all-weather roads with its automobiles, buses, and trucks helped to sustain.
Native American Transportation
For the Native peoples, the Great Plains was a global of enormous distances. All Indigenous groups of the Plains, whether nomads or seminomads, spent much of their time following the wide-ranging bison herds. In addition, the scarcity of streams and scattered distribution of springs, the primary sources of water, forced these peoples to cover enormous distances on a daily basis. Finally, most Plains tribes were engaged in long-distance commerce at trade centers such as the Arikara and Mandan-Hidatsa villages on the upper Missouri River, which, for some tribes, meant covering hundreds of miles.
The primary reason that made the distances so demanding was the lack of e.cient transportation facilities in the period before contact with Europeans. Native Americans lacked large beasts of burden such as camels and horses. Their only domesticated animal was the dog, which was used to raise loads and to draw the travois. Native peoples employed the travois to transport household utensils, weapons, tools, tipi covers, firewood, and meat, but a dog could haul only about sixty pounds, which meant that human beings, particularly women, did most of the carrying themselves.
Most Plains rivers were dry for too long each year to be useful channels for water transportation. As a result, only a few Plains tribes, including the Assiniboines, Blackfoot, and Crees, used canoes, while others relied only on land transportation. The Assiniboines, Blackfoot, and Crees were particularly skillful in using the canoe. In the early eighteenth century, for example, the Blackfoot canoed to the Hudson Bay to trade with the British. More locally, the tribes along the Missouri River developed bullboats–small, light, bowl-shaped vessels made of bison hides–for transportation of goods.
The event that changed the traditional transportation system was, of course, the introduction of the horse to the Plains by the Spanish. (Actually, the proper term would be reintroduction, for horses had lived on the Plains until they became extinct around 8000-6000 B.C.) Coronado and other early Spanish conquistadors explored the Southern Plains on horseback in the sixteenth century, but horses did not begin to spread among the Indians until the Spanish established a permanent colony, New Mexico, at the southwestern edge of the Plains at the end of the sixteenth century. Gradually, through trade and theft, horses spread from the New Mexican ranches in all directions, so that by the end of the eighteenth century all Plains tribes were mounted.
In time, the introduction of the horse was to have far-reaching cultural, economic, and political effects among the Plains Indians, but the most immediate consequence was a transportation revolution. The horse was about eight times as e.cient as the dog: it could raise on its back or haul on a travois a load four times heavier than the load a dog could manage, and it could travel twice as far in a day. Thus, horse transport allowed Indians to raise more tools and utensils, extra foodstuffs, and larger tipis, and suddenly nomadism did not require giving up all but the bare minimum of possessions. It also made it possible for Indians to hunt bison more effectively, and this enticed horticulturists–the Omahas, for example–to increase the role of hunting in their economies. Interaction between tribes increased as sheer distance became less of an obstacle. In short, like railroads in the late nineteenth century, horses reduced the friction of distance, opened new economic possibilities, and raised the standards of living on the Plains.
The adoption of horses also resulted in the abandonment of canoes, usually within a generation after the Indians received their first horses. Dogs, on the other hand, continued to be used for transportation throughout the prereservation period. This was particularly the case on the Northern Great Plains, where distance from the source of horses and cold winters, which made herding more di.cult and labor intensive, reduced the availability and numbers. The Southern Plains Indians, who had the largest herds, continued to use dogs to raise small items such as moccasins and household utensils.
Waterways
When European Americans entered the Great Plains, they often paddled or floated along thousands of miles of meandering waterways. In the late eighteenth century, when the rival Hudson’s Bay and North West Companies extended their fur-trading hinterlands to the Prairies and Parkland Belt, they introduced to the region the water transportation systems they had developed in the Petit Nord (the area bounded by Hudson Bay, Lake Superior, and Lake Winnipeg) during the preceding century. The trading posts were linked to the Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence River by annual brigades traveling primarily by birch-bark canoes. Paddling along the Saskatchewan River to Lake Winnipeg, then either to the Hudson Bay along the Nelson or Hayes Rivers or to the St. Lawrence along the Winnipeg River and the Great Lakes, the brigades moved furs and other cargoes effectively. The light, maneuverable birch-bark canoe had a cargo capacity of almost 3,000 pounds and allowed a crew of five or six men to achieve a speed of five or six miles per hour. Such swiftness was crucial, because the northern rivers were navigable for only a few months between the spring thaw and fall freeze.
In contrast to their canoe-using counterparts, the American fur companies along the Missouri River system were able to use larger vessels such as keelboats and mackinaws. Powered by oars, sail, or cordelle (that is, pulled by a rope by men who laboriously walked the bank), keelboats could cover a distance of fifteen to twenty miles a day upstream, carrying a load of twenty to thirty tons of cargo. The broad, flat-bottomed mackinaws, which were used only for downstream shipments, were up to twenty feet long and carried a crew of five or six men and as many as 2,500 bison robes. Driven by the current, they could achieve up to 100 miles a day. For low-bulk and short-distance carriage, the American traders used pirogues (a construction of two canoes fastened together with planks), dugout canoes, and bullboats.
Although mackinaws, canoes, and bullboats continued to be used by fur traders and others at least until the 1870s, the advent of the steamboat on the Missouri River in 1831 revolutionized navigation. By the 1860s, paddle wheelers served as great beasts of burden along the principal streams, particularly the churning 2,285 miles of the Missouri River from its mouth near St. Louis to Fort Benton, a military post in present-day Montana. Supplies for farmers, miners, ranchers, soldiers, and trappers moved by water, as did cargoes of cattle, grain, furs, and mining machinery.
Steamboating posed challenges. Rivers on the Plains were generally unreliable, as they were often braided and shallow, and most flowed through areas of comparatively light annual precipitation. Melting winter snows, spring freshets, and sometimes-heavy autumn rains swelled portions of these streams, but during much of the year they contained inadequate water levels. The Missouri, for example, could be continuously navigated only from mid-March to late June. Even if ample depths existed, snags and sawyers often cluttered the waterways. Rocky shoals, rushing rapids, and shifting channels commonly hindered passage. High prairie winds, too, buffeted vessels, blowing them onto sandbars or into the banks or even causing them to capsize.
A special type of steamboat facilitated navigational ventures. Boats on Plains rivers were ideally suited for the di.cult conditions. The use of compact, high-pressure, yet powerful steam engines, which permitted construction of inexpensive and easily maintained crafts with shallow drafts, allowed these vessels to ply relatively shallow streams. Some boats allegedly required only a “heavy morning dew” to navigate.
During the heyday of steamboating on Plains rivers, traffic could be brisk. An individual vessel might handle scores of passengers and considerable quantities of freight. In the late 1870s boats traveling the waters of the Red River of the North between Fargo and Fort Garry carried settlers with their possessions and supplies northbound and pushed barges loaded with buffalo hides and wheat southbound.
Yet commercial steamboating on Plains rivers was largely ephemeral. Service on some streams ended as soon as a railroad penetrated the territory. Residents along the Brazos River, for example, benefited from limited navigation from the Gulf of Mexico northwestward to Washington, Texas, a distance of approximately 250 miles. By the Civil War, the Houston and Texas Central Railroad had siphoned away nearly all of the river tra.c, mostly bales of cotton. Even along the Missouri River stagecoaches and later passenger trains quickly attracted travelers, but steamboat freight movements continued, albeit in diminishing amounts. By the 1920s service was nearly gone, lost to railroads and emerging motor carriers. In subsequent years federal dams made long-distance commerce impossible on the upper Missouri, although towboats and barges continued to serve customers between Sioux City, Iowa, and other downriver points. More recently, commercial inland water operators could call at the Port of East Tulsa, Oklahoma, the western terminus of the “canalized” Arkansas River.