Chapter 12: The Great Plains and Prairies

The Great Plains is a region that stretches from the southern tip of Texas through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, all the way to Alberta on the west, and runs through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma on the East. The region has some of the least variation in vegetation and topography of any region in North America.


D.C. is not located in the Great Plains region, but both D.C. and the Great Plains have rich native American history.


For the Plains Indians, hunting, particularly for buffalo was the primary economic activity and most tribes lived along the streams in semipermanent settlements. With no means of rapid, long-distance overland movement, the Indians could not leave the dependable water supplies of the streams for long periods. This was a substantial problem, for the migration of the great buffalo herds often took this food source far away from settlements for many weeks.


Great Plains Indians--1880

When Spanish explorers departed from the souther Plains in the sixteenth century, they left some of their horses behind. This action dramatically altered the Plains Indians' lifestyle. When the Euro-Americans reached the great Plain in the early nineteenth century, they found what many have called the finest light cavalry in  world history. Plains indians were no longer restricted to the region's sparse waterways and freely followed the buffalo migration. Horses enabled the Indians to thrive as never before. A few tribes, like the DAkota (Sioux) in the north, the Apache and the Comanche, dominated large sections of the Great Plains.

The horse completely changed the American Indians' lives.

D.C. Indians

The Piscataway tribe lived along the Piscataway Creek in the Prince George's region of Maryland up to our Washington D.C. Most of the tribe settled comfortably in small villages and camps along the Chesapeake Bay. The men built wigwams and "dug-out canoes," while the women made pottery and baskets. It is said that these "physically dark, very tall, muscular and well-proportioned people" enjoyed their way of life and they only looked to obtain one thing: peace.

Europeans meet the Piscataways   

On March 25, 1634 when Lord Cecil Calvert and his Catholic crew landed and began establishing the English Colony of Maryland. Because the native Piscataways had already settled in the area, Calvert's conquest didn't go over as smoothly as he thought it would. Calvert decreed that everyone in the land convert to Catholicism, but the Piscataways practiced their own traditional religion, and could not interpret the English language to remotely understand a foreign faith. Therefore, the Piscataways had no idea what Cecil Calvert was talking about, but when he "composed a grammar, dictionary and catechism in [their] dialect," Algonquian. 

 Time and time again, Calvert and company came to convert them, but they held fast to their beliefs and did not give in. With time, the Piscataways were asked to leave the prime lands around the Chesapeake. Not only did they receive an eviction notice, in the Northwest, the Susquehannocks, "a warlike tribe," also sought to drive the Piscataways out from their land and "destroy them." In doing so, the Susquehannocks, who were a powerful Native American warlike tribe, also sought to drive the Piscataways out from their land and "destroy them." 

Hardly anyone knows what happened to the Piscataways, and they have been all but forgotten in modern society.

Information from:

1. Textbook

2. D.C. Pages, Origins of the Piscataway