The Civilization of the American Indian

1 primary work • 5 total works

Indians of the Woodlands

by George E. Hyde

Published 1 December 1962

Pawnee Indians

by George E. Hyde

Published 1 May 1974

No assessment of the Plains Indians can be complete without some account of the Pawnees. They ranged from Nebraska to Mexico and, when not fighting among themselves, fought with almost every other Plains tribe at one time or another. Regarded as ""aliens"" by many other tribes, the Pawnees were distinctively different from most of their friends and enemies.

George Hyde spent more than thirty years collecting materials for his history of the Pawnees. The story is both a rewarding and a painful one. The Pawnee culture was rich in social and religious development. But the Pawnees' highly developed political and religious organization was not a source of power in war, and their permanent villages and high standard of living made them inviting and 'fixed targets for their enemies.

They fought and sometimes defeated larger tribes, even the Cheyennes and Sioux, and in one important battle sent an attacking party of Cheyennes home in humiliation after seizing the Cheyennes' sacred arrows. While many Pawnee heroes died fighting off enemy attacks on Loup Fork, still more died of smallpox, of neglect at the hands of the government, and of errors in the policies of Quaker agents.

In many ways The Pawnee Indians is the best synthesis Hyde ever wrote. It looks far back into tribal history, assessing Pawnee oral history against anthropological evidence and examining military patterns and cultural characteristics.

Hyde tells the story of the Pawnees objectively, reinforcing it with firsthand accounts gleaned from many sources, both Indian and white.

A Sioux Chronicle

by George E. Hyde

Published 1 November 1956

Though confined to the great Dakota reservation in 1878, the still-defiant Sioux did not end their struggle with the white man until well into the twentieth century. Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century the Sioux-finding themselves united for the first time in their history-waged a cold war with the United States Department of the Interior, the Indian Bureau, the various Indian agents sent to supervise Sioux Reservation life, and the so-called Indian Friends of the East, who sought to ""school and church"" the Sioux into submission.

Red Cloud's Folk

by George E. Hyde

Published 15 June 1937

The westward drive of the warlike Sioux Indians along a thousand miles of prairie and woodland, from the upper reaches of the Mississippi to the lower Powder River in Montana, is one of the epic migrations of history. From about 1660 to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Teton Sioux swept away all opposition: Arikaras, Ponkas, Crees, Crows, Cheyennes--all fell away and dispersed as the Sioux advanced, until the invaders ranged over a vast territory in the northwest, hunting buffalo and raiding their neighbors. During the ensuing years of heavy conflict, between 1865 and 1877, Red Cloud of the Oglalas stood out as one of the greatest of the Sioux leaders.

Spotted Tail's Folk

by George E. Hyde

Published December 1961

Spotted Tail, the great head chief of the Brule Sioux, was an intelligent and farseeing man who realized alone of all the Sioux that the old way of life was doomed and that to war with the white soldiers was certain suicide. Although he was branded a traitor by many members of his tribe, the canny Brule, with all the skill of an accomplished diplomat, fought a delaying action over the council tables with the high officials in Washington. The only man in the tribe big enough to stand up to the whites and insist upon the rights of the Brules under existing treaties with the U. S. government, he used every means available to him, short of a shooting war, to protect his people from being rushed into the white man's ways by government agents and eastern ""Friends of the Indians.""

Thus the story of Spotted Tail is the story of the Brule struggle against being made into imitation whites overnight, even when they were forced on the reservation, where they were expected to farm the land, raise cattle, send their children to school, and adopt Christianity-all at once.

The assassination of Spotted Tail in 1881 by his political enemy, Crow Dog, ended the history of the Brule Sioux as a tribe. With the great voice stilled, at Rosebud Agency only the voices of little men were heard, quarreling about little matters. With his death, the government effected its purpose: to break the tribal organization to bits and put the Brules under the control of their white agent.