Little more than a century ago, tens of thousands of Indians occupied North America's Great Plains, a sprawling geographic province stretching from southern Canada to the Mexican border, spanning the vast prairies between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the east and the Rocky Mountains in the west.
These Plains Indians lived in a land of contrasts and extremes, a place of towering peaks and plummeting canyons, of droughts and flash floods, of blistering heat and numbing frost, where life was a miracle and death loomed just over one's shoulder.
Most lived in the roving hunting bands that formed such tribes as the Sioux, Shoshone, Kiowa, and Crow. Dispersing in spring and summer, coming together again in winter encampments, they followed paths laid out by perhaps as many as a hundred million buffalo. Fanned out across the prairie were seemingly endless herds of the shaggy haired, crescent-horned beasts, which provided the hunters with nearly all the necessities of existence: raw materials for the food, clothing, weapons, tools, and tipis that made the Indians' way of life possible.
As Plains Indians looked at the world, they perceived the wonders of nature's color and form, and the magnificence of the plumage, horns, and furs decorating other creatures. In comparison, the people felt naked and tried to fit in by drawing man-made beauty from natural materials.
At its heart, Plains Indian art was utilitarian. Elegant quillwork, flamboyant feathered bonnets, finely carved wooden pipe stems, and painted designs decorating tipis and hide robes, all created from the materials nature offered--hides; porcupine and bird quills; wood, horn, and bone; colors from plants and Mother Earth--spoke of a compelling need to create and be surrounded by beauty. Small wonder a Sioux dressed in his finery proudly sang: "Whoever consider themselves beautiful, after seeing me has no heart."
These were a people who cherished memories. "A people without history," the Sioux maintained, "is like wind on the buffalo grass." And their history was composed of many vibrant fragments. Whispers of lovers on the outskirts of tipi villages. Visions of bravery and mystic rituals. Thundering hooves of horses and buffalo. Warriors, clashing in combat, caked in dust, fighting for life, filling the air with exultant cries of victory and anguished sounds of lives torn asunder.
Brave, rallying words, like those shouted by famed Sioux leader Crazy Horse: "Come brothers, it is a good day to die! Come brothers, only the rocks last forever!"
During the Plains Indian Wars of the 1860s and '70s, as tribes contended with the United States Army for control of the prairies--conflict leading to the advent of the reservation period, which began in earnest in the 1870s--warrior-artists preserved these memories and more in pencil and ink, enlivened with bold lines and bright colors, on pages of ledger books obtained through raid or trade.
They made these records in the mass-produced volumes Euramericans used to keep financial records and diaries, transcribing their experience just as history's sweeping tide enveloped them and as the magnitude and full force of America's
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