Dakota Datebook: Intertribal Trade

For more than thirteen hundred years, the Dakota prairies were home to some of the most extensive trading centers on the American continent.

As early as 350 A.D., there existed a highly developed network of trade throughout North America. Centrally positioned on the American continent, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara villages located along the Missouri River served as two of the network’s main trading centers. At these trading sites the Cree, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Comanche, Teton and Crow nations traded goods from around the continent. American Indians of the upper plains traded for items originating from thousands of miles away; sea-shells from the Pacific Ocean, obsidian from Wyoming and Conch shells from the Gulf Coast.

Both the Mandan and the Arikara conducted trade throughout the summer and into the fall. However, as some tribes traveled great distances to trade in the Dakotas, many carefully planned their arrival at the Mandan and Arikara villages.

Washington Matthews, an Army medical officer stationed at Fort Berthold in the 1860’s observed that when the Dakota tribes saw the dotted blazing star blooming on the prairie in the late summer, on a day much like today, “they knew that the corn was ripe, and went to the villages of the farming Indians to trade.”

As with any system of international commerce, when the Indian traders arrived at the commerce centers they needed a measure of exchange, something by which everything traded could be compared. In the intertribal exchange of the nineteenth century, one standard of value was the buffalo-horse, a horse fast enough to run down an adult buffalo. For a single buffalo-horse, one could receive 12 spruce-poles to build a good skin-lodge, a few eagle tail feathers for a headdress, guns, a variety of European commodities, or even seashells from the coast.

By the 1860’s this intertribal trade network was but a shadow of its former glory, and eventually disappeared completely. However, the resourcefulness and ingenuity of America’s earliest commodity traders remain an important part of North Dakota’s vibrant past.

“Dakota Datebook” is a radio series from Prairie Public in partnership with the State Historical Society of North Dakota and with funding from Humanities North Dakota.