The Rise of the Lakota — Part 1

I give you these because they have no ears, Chief Sitting Bull. The first of all were the children, cut down in a hail of bullets, their lives stuffed out before they even knew of the approach of the soldiers. It had been a peaceful morning. Besides the Greasy Grass River, the children played as the men prepared to go hunting, and the women dug wild turnips seconds before a runner came tearing through the camp, a lone Lakota warrior.

Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, they're coming. He yelped as panic spread. The scout had spotted the approach of the column from the dust clouds cast up by the hooves of their horses, robbing the blue jacketed, pale skinned men of the much valued element of surprise. In a moment, the camp was a hive of activity. Mothers picked up children to head for safety, accompanied by the elderly and the sick. Fathers rushed into tents, slinging rifles and bows over shoulders, thrusting knives, Tomahawks and revolvers into their belts, grasping for what ammunition was at hand. The warning was not enough to get the children to safety. Their bodies scattered the ground, joined by the lifeless corpses of their mothers, who flung themselves down to protect them.

In that first moment, the Lakota must have feared the worst. If the soldiers carried on their advantage, then the Lakota might be deprived of the ability to establish a defensive position from which to withstand the assault at Sand Creek in 1864 and Wichita in 1868. The Blue Coats had complete surprise, and in the ensuing battle, as the East Coast press described it, hundreds of Native people had been massacred. But today, today was a very different day.

Surprisingly, the soldiers did not press their attack. Major Marcus Reno, commander of the approaching troops, ordered his men to dismount and establish A skirmish line. Pause in their momentum just long enough for clear heads in the camp to direct warriors to face the threat. It would be a crucial moment in the history of one of the most famous and era defining events of the American West. Was it perhaps overconfidence that allowed the US soldiers to pause before pressing ahead? After all, with their Springfield modelled 1873 carbines, able to fire up to 15 shots a minute and accurate at a range of 1000 yards, surely they would make short work of the Lakota.

Had history not delivered her verdict on the peoples of the Plains? Were they not simply to fade away, bequeathed their land to the more advanced, more civilized, more virtuous, more godly, and of course more deserving white men? But soon a new sensation was passing through the line of Reno's men, a sensation quite different from the confidence born of Manifest Destiny. Doubt theirs may have been a more technologically advanced civilization, but what the native peoples could not match in hardware, they made-up for in will to resist.

As the soldiers fired their disciplined volleys towards the Lakota, the Lakota ranks did not wither, rather they swelled as a steady stream of reinforcements buttressed their position. The Lakota returned fire and it was the Blue Coats soon enough feeling the pressure as comrades fell around them with the soldiers engaging in a jewel of rifle fire with their Lakota series. A Lakota warrior by the name of Chief Gaul, whose family had been caught in the initial attack and killed, led a charge on the soldiers flank.

Outnumbered and unable to commit to face the threat from either the warriors firing or Gauls flanking attack, the soldiers line crumbled, discipline collapsed and panic swept through the ranks. Further north, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was beginning his own attack. The Battle of Little Bighorn had been joined. For Custer, hero of the American Civil War and famous, or should we say infamous, Indian fighter, it was already going terribly wrong. Custer had always craved glory.

He yearned to write his name in blood and steel in the history box, and he was about to get his wish. For unlike Sand Creek and Washita, this would be no massacre of women and children written up by the American press as a glorious triumph of white skin heroes against savage heathen Barbarians. This would be a battle that would echo through the ages as a warning to all supremely confident and ambitious imperial powers that no matter how great their technological advantage or how assured of the divine favour of the heavens, they were but human flesh and blood just like those they sought to conquer. Welcome to ancient, to recent.

My name is Joseph Parkinson, and today we begin a brand new series on the history of the Lakota. To support the show, subscribe today and leave a comment or rating. Episodes of Ancient Theresa are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The little Bighorn, known to the Lakota as the Greasy Grass, flows calmly through the valley for which it gives its name. The river rises deep in the Bighorn Mountains and meanders through the states of present day Montana and Wyoming. Over millennia the river has carved deep canyons in the plains, it's nutrient rich waters sustaining animal and human alike.

It was here that humans had made their home for at least 10,000 and perhaps as far back as 12,000 years. Their ancestors had moved eastward from Asia across Beringia, the landmass that once connected Russia and North America, at a time when sea levels were lower into what is now Alaska and eventually into the modern day United States. They were drawn South by changing weather patterns at the end of the last Ice Age that made the vast grasslands appealing. The climate was mild, soil fertile and game plentiful. For thousands of years, humans fought and squabbled over these same lands.

The valley had been inhabited by many peoples. The Shawnee arrived and established their dominance as early as the 13th century, roughly at the same time as Genghis Khan was uniting the peoples of the Eurasian steppe and King John of England signing the Magna Carta next to come with the Crows, displacing the Shawnee and establishing their rule over the valley in the late 16th and early 17th century. But the Crows were not the only ambitious imperial power in North America at the time. The English were eagerly found in colonies on the American eastern seaboard, founding a settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The French had established themselves along the Saint Lawrence River and founded the city of Quebec in 1608. But it was not just European settlers looking for new real estate.

In the 17th century, the Lakota were a distinct group of peoples sharing similar customs and language that migrated northwest from the central Mississippi Valley. The Lakota were part of a broader confederation of peoples called the Ossete Saccoeen or 7 Council fires, a group of seven peoples who spoke one of three dialects of the Siouan language family, Lakota, Dakota and Nakota. This loose confederation conferred strength as opposed to weakness, as it allowed each part of the confederation to call upon the support of the other peoples whilst avoiding civil strife. As the Osseti Sakoween, also known as Sioux, migrated and expanded their sphere of influence, they swept other peoples aside, sometimes taking them as slaves. The Sioux didn't practice slavery exactly in the same sense as was common in Europe or the Middle East. The fate of those taken captive could be buried. Some were doomed to a life of servitude. Others would be adopted into the body politic, with full political rights and responsibilities seen as an essential infusion of fresh blood. Others were destined to be ritually executed. A Sioux warrior could select amongst the women for his new wife, and a Sioux woman who had lost her husband was free if she so desired to have the newly arrived slaves killed. In the 17th century, the Sioux inhabited an area of around 60,000 miles around the upper Mississippi Valley in modern day Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Great Lakes area. There they enjoyed an abundance of food with a varied diet of duck, fish, deer root vegetables and wild game. In 1659, the Sioux had their first contact with Europeans in the form of French traders sailing through the Great Lakes. Traditionally, as it happened in Central America, the encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans was accompanied by the exchange of pathogens and followed by epidemic disease. This had been the case with many Eastern native peoples, with smallpox carrying away sometimes entire communities. But the Sioux lived over such a large area that the diseases that spread like wildfire through others had limited impact.

Not so lucky with the native peoples of the Great Lakes, such as the Iroquois. The Iroquois experienced devastating population collapse, with as much as half of their population succumbing to European diseases. But the Iroquois decided to meet catastrophe with aggression, setting upon an ambitious campaign of military expansion to replenish their numbers through forced adoption. As the Iroquois pushed outwards other smaller lakes, people such as the Kree and Ojibwe were forced back.

Soon refugees were flooding into Sioux territory and these people, who'd lived in close proximity to the French who they had traded much sought after Beaver pelts with, possessed something the Sioux lacked, guns. The musket was a great force equalizer in 16th and 17th century North America. Even small nations armed with the latest European weapons could project power over more numerous foes. A bow required physical strength, years of training and considerable skill.

A musket could be mastered in mere hours and lethal in the hands of an amateur. As the newcomers pushed into Sioux territory, bloody clashes broke out. The Sioux sought to acquire their own supply of guns, but with limited success. But their sheer numbers compared to the newcomers allowed them to stay in the fight. Isolation may have deprived the suit of the technological advantages bestowed on those who traded with the French, but it also shielded them from the diseases that devastated whole populations. So isolated were they that there are no recorded outbreaks of epidemic disease amongst the Sioux. Prior to the 17th century, the Sioux came to the attention of the French, who could not ignore the burgeoning military power that possessed something the French could neither command nor purchase numbers.

In the 17th and 18th century, France was in the midst of a global battle for market share with their old foe, the English. The struggle between the whale and the elephant raged on every continent, from Calcutta to California and from the coast of Ireland to the Cape. Both England and France sought allies amongst native peoples, but the French were hampered by inconsistent policy making in Paris that often sowed confusion. However, despite initial French indecision, the interests of the two converged.

The Sioux needed guns and the French summoned to wield them. The French knew that the land mass of North America was too vast, the distance from France too great, and the route too subject to the superior naval power of the English for France to dominate the continent with conventional military force. If France was to establish herself as the premier imperial power in the Americas, then she would need someone else to be the muscle. In 1670, French interest in the Sioux took on a new urgency. England had been torn apart by civil war between 1642 and 1651. The conflict had seen the overthrow and execution of the English monarch, Charles the 1st, and for a brief and terrible moment England suffered under the most detestable form of government conceivable, A form of government so wicked, so sinister, so unnatural that some have speculated that only Satan himself could possibly have conceived of it. Republicanism.

But eventually decency and common sense prevailed and in 1660 the monarchy was restored under His Majesty King Charles the Second. Charles had received the sympathy, if not outright support of the King of France, Louis the 14th, in an effort to weaken republican England. But with Charles safely established on the throne, he did what any patriotic Englishman would do and stuck 2 fingers up at France by granting the Hudson Bay Company a Royal charter to trade in modern day Canada in direct conflict with French interests. Now English colonies encroached upon French territory in all directions and threatened to sever the arteries of trade that sustained the French presence in Quebec. The French responded by seeking to formalise their relationship with Indigenous peoples through the granting of trade licenses over the American interior.

French merchants went forth and established trading posts in Sioux territory, an important innovation as no longer did Indigenous peoples have to travel to Quebec to sell their wares. With a sudden rush of French merchants into Siouxlands and a flurry of trade between the two peoples. With trade came guns. Now the Sioux had the numbers and the weapons to throw their weight around. The French sort of bring the Sioux and other indigenous peoples under their sway.

They hoped to bring peace to the upper Mississippi, and with peace would come at the greater profits. But by arming the Sioux, the technological check on their expansion evaporated and soon the Sioux were pressing on other indigenous groups. An effort to pacify the region had ironically unsettled the delicate balance of power and unleashed carnage. The French sort of broke a peace between indigenous groups. Their mediated disputes, punished wrongdoers and offered bribes to those who would put all grievances aside. But the Sioux were not so eager to be restrained. The Sioux were a people on the March and not keen to be held in check just when powers within their grasp. But it was not just the French who saw allies amongst native peoples.

In the 1680's, the English backed the Orokis, who yet again set upon a campaign of military expansion. Iraqi raiding parties burned villages and sent refugees fleeing into Siouxlands. Yet again, the French sphere of influence, so carefully constructed, seemed to buckle under the weight of Iraqi military advances so disastrous with the Iraqi attacks to French commercial interests that the governor of Quebec concluded that unless Iraqi expansion could be checked, France's colonial possessions would be unsustainable and France's entire imperial project in the Americas may have to be abandoned.

The French said about Building A grand coalition that would include the Sioux in alliance with other indigenous nations, backed by French weapons and gold. But too much blood had been shed between the Sioux and other peoples, and the French did not have the influence or financial muscle to bring the indigenous peoples to the table to form their grand alliance. The French and English pursued alliances amongst the native peoples not out of altruism but to further their own political and economic interests.

But it must be said the same is exactly true with indigenous peoples. The Sue sided with the fringe over their Anglo rivals not because they preferred the continental breakfast to a full English. No same person would come to such a conclusion, but out of cold political calculation, the Sioux and Erokai sought to play their European patrons just as much as the Europeans sought to play them. The 17th century was a time of technological innovation in North America, and there were few areas of life as radically changed as warfare.

If firearms had acted as a force equalizer between smaller but more technologically advanced peoples and their more numerous neighbors of the American interior, a further innovation was set to transform the Americas that could shift the balance from force equalizer to force projection. This new innovation had actually actually existed in the Americas millennials before, but it disappeared. It was the horse. Horses originated in North America some 45,000,000 years ago and had made the reverse journey of humans crossing into Asia where they spread out and were domesticated. But a combination of shifting climate patterns and human behaviour drove the horse into extinction in North America some 8 to 12,000 years ago.

With the coming of the Spanish, the horse, the Panzer tank of its age, was reintroduced, giving the newcomers A crucial technological advantage. But no technology can be conferred on one people in perpetuity, and soon horses began spreading out from the American South, either through escaping captivity or rustling by indigenous people. The Sioux found themselves in a precarious position, located as they were between the horse riding peoples of the American Southwest and those with access to guns in the east.

The comparative isolation of the Sioux had protected them from disease, but it could not protect them from the encroachment of their indigenous rivals. With neither horses nor regular supply of guns, the Sioux would be put ever back. But if they could harness these new weapons in, the Sioux would be in a unique position to dominate the Central American landmass. In the early 18th century, France's possessions in the Americas were in a precarious state.

The Oroki, who had posed such a challenge, finally found themselves in a state of exhaustion, which allowed France to bring the Oroki to the table and begin negotiations, along with many other indigenous peoples, at the Great Peace Of Montreal in 1701. But the French had not thought to invite their old allies, the Sioux. The French knew that indigenous peoples were the key to imperial power in the Americas, and with peace negotiated, the French saw a chance to remove the Orochi as an English asset on the battlefield. By securing neutrality in return for peace and trade, the Sioux felt excluded by the process, which diminished their role in French affairs.

But the Orochi had not severed their relationship with the English. The English continued to supply the Orochi with firearms and manufactured goods, maintaining a relationship that would remain vital to both sides. The Great Peace had brought an end to an era of major Roki French warfare, but had not ended the competition between indigenous nations of the interior. The Oroki remained a formidable military and political power, while their access to European trade goods gave them considerable advantage in the struggle that continued across the Great Lakes and northeast. If the native people sometimes grew tired of warfare, the same cannot be said of their European neighbors, especially the English and French, who've been knocking the living daylights out of each other for hundreds of years and wouldn't finally grow tired for another century.

Brief periods of respite we used to gather strength and rearm before it was time for the bell to ring and the next round to commence. England later Britain and France had been to war with each other three times in the 17th century and would fight a further 6 wars in the 18th and early 19th. The 2 powers would spend a total of roughly 68 out of 188 years at war with each other between 1627 and 1815. In 1700, Charles the Second, the last Habsburg monarch of Spain, died childless, possibly due to centuries of Habsburg inbreeding that left him infertile. The Spanish, one of Europe's premier powers and then possessing a vast imperial domain that stretched from Peru to California and from Naples to the Philippines, all of a sudden needed a monarch.

Spying an opportunity to turn a former rival into a new vassal, France pushed the claim of Philip, Duke of Anjou, grandson of then King Louis the 14th of France. Bound together, France and Spain would form an unstoppable imperial juggernaut that could carve the world between themselves, Austria, the Dutch Republic, Portugal, Prussia and England, which would become part of Great Britain in 1707, rally to prevent Bourbon, France and Spain from dominating Europe.

But the Sioux stood back from the conflict. They felt betrayed by the former allies and with the conflict heating up, the French increasingly turned to other native peoples. To the Sioux, the East was a land of constant warfare and however tantalising the appeal of guns, the price was always entanglement in France's wards. The West, however, offered something different land, fertile soil and in abundance of game and horses.

Some amongst the Sioux, especially the Lakota, began probing into the West in small bands, but there too they faced resistance. The Lakota was struck by the strangeness of the people they now encountered. Every bit as alien as the French or British, the people of the West were different from the Sioux in ways that went far beyond language. Nations such as the Mandan, Omaha, and Pawnee combined agriculture with hunting and lived in substantial villages, while the Lakota were increasingly drawn towards the mobile hunting economy of the Great Plains. The clash of culture and lifestyle was further enhanced by the inability of the Lakota to offer anything these people needed.

These people have no interest in the Lakota wares and little desire to share the fish of the rivers or crops of the field with the ever numerous strangers from the east. Some Sioux, especially the Lakota, reacted with a policy of military conquest. They would take what they needed and crush those who opposed. But this would be easier said than done. The people of the West were numerous and skilled warriors. They lacked firearms but had a plentiful supply of horses and a warrior with a Lance in hand could often best a warrior on foot even with a musket.

The Lakota did not set upon a strategy of all out conquest, but instead of salami slicing their opponents, conquering one people at a time, capturing 1 valley after another before digesting their foe and moving on to the next meal. But a new problem arose for the Sioux. The Sioux were not a single people, but a large family of nations and the Lakota but one tribe. They spread out across a huge area, but as they did so, the ties of kinship and common interest loosened the interest of western expanding Sioux. People like the Lakota and those more firmly anchored in the East, such as the Dakota and Nakota, began to diverge. The tension was worsened for the western expanding Lakota by their inability to secure a ready supply of firearms, which depended upon their often strained relationship with the French.

Such disadvantages did not hinder the Siouxs, native rivals in the East who found themselves drawn into conflict between France and Britain, but also gained powerful patrons only too eager to provide them with the latest of 18th century firepower. Indigenous people peoples understood the power came from the barrel of a gun and were willing to enlist a fight for either the British or French. Of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, some had horses and others had guns, but none possessed both in abundance.

Whoever could command the two would be in prime position to become the dominant power of the American interior. But it was not just Europeans who were busy starting wars. In 1701, France had founded the settlement of Detroit. French officials sought to fortify their position by drawing native peoples to settle in the surrounding areas with a promise of manufactured goods. But the French soon discovered that bringing rival indigenous nations together around Detroit was a dangerous game. In 1712, tensions finally erupted. The Adawa attacked the Mascoten.

Allies of the Fox and the Mascoten fled to the Fox settlement near Detroit. The Fox took them in and launched A counterattack. What followed was a 19 day siege. Huron, Miami, Illinois, Potawami, Odawa and other indigenous warriors joined together against the Fox and Masquitans surrounding them near Detroit. The French commander refused repeated requests for assistance. By the end of the siege, nearly 1000 Fox and Muscatine had been killed or captured, and the conflict did not end there.

The French would spend years attempting to mediate between their indigenous allies and the Fox before eventually sending their own troops against the Fox in 1716. The episode revealed something the French would learn again and again. Their indigenous allies were not simply soldiers to be commanded. They had their own enemies, their own ambitions, and their own reasons for fighting. France could build the forts, it could supply the guns, but it could not control the wars of the people around them.

The War of Spanish Succession lasted some 13 years before coming to an end. With the Treaty of Utrecht negotiated in 1713. Philip Avonjou would indeed become the King of Spain, and his descendants still sit on the Spanish throne to this very day. In return, the Spanish recognized British claims in present day Canada, with Arcadia, Newfoundland and Rupert's Land all going to the British. The British and French declared the Ohio Valley a free trade zone with native peoples free to do business with either imperial power.

The Treaty would have profound effects on North America and would set the course for future commercial and military conflicts. In the end, peace negotiated at Utrecht was an illusion. Yet another interlude before the resumption of hostilities, economic competition and imperial ambition soon brought the British and French back into conflict. The Treaty of Utrecht had strengthened British commercial position in the Spanish Empire, whilst leaving France shut out of much of the lucrative Spanish American trade. If France was to expand its commercial horizons beyond the Atlantic, it needed new trade routes. For French officials in Q1, possibility was tantalizing. Somewhere beyond the vast interior of North America, they believed there might be a vast waterway leading to the Pacific, a Northwest Passage that could connect New France to the markets of Asia.

If such a passage existed, it could transform the fortunes of the French Empire. French North America would become a commercial hub, generating enormous profits whilst giving France a strategic route around the British colonies clinging to the Atlantic seaboard. But first the French had to find it, and to do so they would have to penetrate one of the least understood regions of North America. The vast network of rivers and lakes stretching W from the Great Lakes offered tantalizing clues. French explorers began pushing ever deeper into the interior, relying heavily on indigenous knowledge to guide them. These explorers were also fur traders, and the search for the Western seas went hand in hand with the expansion of French commercial interests into the interior. The French depended heavily on indigenous trading partners, particularly Cree and Esebuane, whose knowledge of the waterways and peoples of the West allowed French traders and explorers to travel far beyond the limits of European settlement. But the French were walking into an existing world of alliances and rivalries.

The Crewe and Asibwani were old enemies of the Sioux, and French attempts to expand their western trade brought them increasingly into the middle of this conflict. The French initially attempted to mediate between Crewe and Sioux, but their growing cooperation with the Crewe convinced the Sioux that their former French allies were now siding with their enemies. The wounds, however, were not merely diplomatic. In 1736, a Sioux war party attacked a French expedition at Lake of the Woods. 21 Frenchmen were killed. The massacre was revenge for French backed Cree and Asabwani attacks on the Sioux.

The French had discovered a dangerous truth. Their indigenous allies could help them penetrate the interior, but by choosing sides in indigenous conflicts, they could also become targets themselves. The Korean Assabuan, meanwhile, remained important partners in the French Western trade network. While the Sioux found themselves increasingly distrustful of the French. The Sioux now found themselves pressed from several directions. Their relationship with the French had collapsed, their old enemies of the Korean Assabuanne were expanding their influence, and to the West, the Lakota were increasingly pushing into the Great Plains.

The result was a cycle of violence, with a massacre answered by counter massacre. Yet the French could not simply abandoned the Sioux. Their position in the interior depended upon maintaining relations with as many indigenous nations as possible, and with another war with Great Britain becoming increasingly likely, the French needed those relationships more than ever. By the early 1740s, French officials were once again attempting to restore peace between the indigenous nations of the interior.

In 1742, Sioux leaders were amongst the indigenous delegates visiting Montreal whilst French officials attempted to stabilize the and restore their influence. The motivation of the French was not altruism. France and Britain were once again moving towards war, and the French could not afford to have their indigenous allies exhausting themselves fighting against one another when those same warriors might soon be needed against the British. For the moment, diplomacy worked. Peace was restored sufficiently for the French to rebuild their relationship across the interior, but peace between France and Britain was already running out. Few people ever lost money in the 18th century, betting on Britain and France to go to war.

And sure enough, in 1744 hostilities resumed. The War of Austrian Succession had already begun in 1740, after the death of the Habsburg Emperor Charles the 6th. Charles had no sons, and the succession passed to his daughter Maria Theresa, but other European powers saw an opportunity. Frederick the Second of Prussia, Frederick the Great invaded the Austrian province of Silesia in December 1740. He claimed A dynastic justification for the invasion, but the calculation was brutally practical. Maria Theresa was a young woman inheriting a vast and vulnerable monarchy, and Frederick believed Austria could be defeated before other European powers could come to her aid. Silesia was enormously valuable, with a prosperous economy and important mineral resources.

Frederick gambled that he could seize it before anyone could stop him. He was right. At first, the European powers divided into rival camps. France saw an opportunity to weaken it's ancestral Habsburg enemy. Britain meanwhile wanted Austria preserved as a counterweight to French power. At first the 2 great powers were content to supply their respective allies with money and weapons, but eventually was no longer enough. France and Britain entered the war directly, and as Europe went to war, so too did America.

In North America, the conflict became known as King George's War. The First blows felt quickly. French forces attacked British positions in Nova Scotia, whilst French and British colonial forces prepared for a much larger struggle. For the indigenous peoples of the interior, the war created a familiar dilemma. The Sioux did not trust the French, but France remained one of their most important potential sources of firearms and manufactured goods. Once again, the French needed indigenous allies. Once again, the Ohio Valley became a point of confrontation. British traders were pushing westward into territory claimed by France, whilst French officials sought to prevent British commercial influence from penetrating the interior. By the early 1750's, the rivalry was becoming increasingly militarized.

In 1752, French allied indigenous forces attacked British aligned indigenous communities and helped drive British traders from parts of the Ohio Valley. The following year, the French began strengthening their military position in the region. The contest was no longer simply about trade. It was becoming a struggle over who would control the criteria of North America. And in 1754, a young British officer named George Washington would March into the Ohio Country with orders to defend British claims. He would soon discover just how far France was prepared to go to defend its own.

The conflict there had been building for decades finally exploded in 1754. What began as a dispute between Britain and France over the Ohio Valley would soon become a global war. The Seven Years War would eventually be fought across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, and the seas, but nowhere would the consequences be more profound than in North America. The French had spent decades constructing an enormous network of forts, trading posts, and indigenous allies connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

But Britain possessed 2 enormous advantages that France could never overcome. People and money. The British colonies had a vastly larger population than New France, giving Britain a much deeper pool of soldiers, settlers and labour. But Britain also possessed something even more powerful and extraordinarily sophisticated financial system. The Bank of England, a well developed national debt and deep capital markets allowed the British government to borrow vast summers to finance its wars. France might possess an enormous empire, but Britain had developed the ability to turn credit into military power and that money paid for another decisive advantage, the Royal Navy.

Britain could finance fleets, transport armies across the Atlantic and crucially, use it's naval superiority to cut France off from it's North American colonies. In a war, cash is king and armies March on their stomachs. A nation can have as many soldiers as it wants, but without the arms to equip them, food to feed them, money to pay them and ships to transport them, they are of little use. In the end, it's not the size of a nation's muscles that wins wars, but the size of its wallet.

Without the means to deploy major military resources to the Americas, France depended heavily upon its indigenous allies. Britain did too. The difference was that Britain could increasingly draw upon its colonial population to provide soldiers and supplies, whilst also reinforcing its position with fresh troops from its own shores. France, on the other hand, needed indigenous military support to compensate for its demographic weakness amongst its colonial population and its inability to provide reinforcements from Europe.

And as the war began, the indigenous nations of the interior were faced with a familiar choice. Which European power could best serve their interests? For the Lakota, however, the question became increasingly complicated. They had spent decades moving W the horse was transforming their society. What had once been a people concentrated around the upper Mississippi was becoming increasingly orientated towards the Great Plains. The Lakota could now travel farther, hunt more efficiently, and project military power over much greater distance. And the plains offered something the forests of the East could not Buffalo.

Millions of these great beasts moved across the grasslands, providing meat, hides and other resources to a people increasingly adapted to a mobile way of life. But the Lakota were not moving into an empty wilderness. The plains were already occupied by powerful indigenous nations, to the West with a Crow, to the South with a Pawnee, to the north and east with a Cree and Asabwani, whose growing alliance with France had already brought them into conflict with the Sioux. The Lakota's expansion therefore became another front in the enormous web of indigenous warfare that had existed long before the Europeans arrived.

And now the Europeans were pouring weapons into that world. Firearms mattered enormously. A horse could transform how quickly a warrior could move. A gun could transform how effective he could fight, but possessing both created something far more powerful. The Lakota were acquiring horses, their enemies were acquiring guns, and European empires were increasingly willing to trade both for indigenous loyalty. In 1754, the first shots of the seven-year War were fired in the Ohio Valley.

George Washington's expedition against the French ended in disaster at Fort Necessity. The French responded by strengthening their forts and mobilizing their indigenous allies. The British now understood that this was no longer simply a commercial dispute. France intended to defend its claims to the interior by force. And France understood the same thing about the British. The war was spreading. In 1755, Britain launched a series attacks against French positions.

The most disastrous came at Monaga Halle, where a British Army under General Edward Braddock was ambushed by a combined French and indigenous force. The British regulars were trained to fight European armies. The men shooting at them from the forest were not. Indigenous warfare proved brutally effective against European formations operating in unfamiliar terrain. But the British had one enormous advantage. They could replace their losses.

France could not match Britain's growing economic and demographic strength indefinitely. The war was therefore becoming a contest of endurance. And while the European empires fought for forts and rivers, the Lakota were fighting a war of their own. Their movement onto the plains accelerated. The horse was becoming central to Lakota life. Hunting Buffalo from horseback allowed them to obtain enormous quantities of meet and hides, whilst horses themselves became a form of wealth and a means of transportation. The Lakota were becoming increasingly mobile and mobility changed the balance of power.

A people that could move rapidly across hundreds of miles could raid enemies, relocate their abilities, pursue Buffalo herds and respond to threats in ways that agricultural societies could not easily match. The transformation would eventually make the Lakota one of the dominant military powers of the North and Central Plains. But in the 1750s this transformation was still under way and the Seven Years War was helping to accelerate it. European demands for indigenous allies meant more trade. More trade meant more firearms, ammunition, horses and manufactured goods entering indigenous networks and every weapon that reached 1 nation changed the calculation of it's neighbors.

The French were desperate for allies, so were the British. The result was an arms race amongst indigenous nations. The Lakota were not simply watching the European war from the sideline, they were living through the consequences of it. Yet the French could not give the Lakota everything they wanted. The French were separated from the Lakota by enormous distance, and their access to the Northern Plains depended heavily upon their alliance with the Kree, A subwane, and other nations. The Lakota therefore continued to seek weapons through whatever channel were available, and as the war intensified, the balance of power across the interior began to shift. In 1759, the British captured Quebec. The following year, Montreal fell. With the fall Of Montreal, the French were now cut off from their indigenous allies.

The dream of a French North America was over. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 formally ended the war. France surrendered Canada and most of its mainland American possessions east of the Mississippi to the British. But the consequences of the indigenous people of the continent were only beginning. For the French, the defeat meant the destruction of an imperial system that had supplied many indigenous nations with firearms and trade goods.

For the British, victory meant access to enormous new territory. For the Lakota, however, the collapse of French power created both danger and opportunity. Their old French Connection had been severed, but so too had the Cree and Asabuani networks that had constrained their expansion to the north and east. The Lakota were now entering a world in which the great European empires had changed the bounds of power without ever fully controlling it.

The British had won the war, but they had not conquered the interior, and the Lakota were about to discover that the greatest opportunity for expansion was not eastward towards the British colonies, but W into the vast Buffalo rich plains. The horse had given them ability. The gun would give them firepower, and over the next half century, the Lakota would use both to build one of the most formidable indigenous powers in North America. The disintegration of the French Empire left the Sioux reeling. For generations, the French had been one of their most important sources of firearms, powder and manufactured goods. Now that relationship had been shattered. The French had lost their empire in Canada and much of their territory east of the Mississippi, whilst Louisiana passed into Spanish hands.

For the Lakota, the consequences were immediate. The steady flow of European goods became harder to secure, the old networks of trade were disrupted, and the Lakota increasingly had to look elsewhere. The Lakota had been moving W for generations, drawn by the extraordinary abundance of Buffalo, but now they face a problem. Their access to firearms was uncertain, while their enemies possessed guns of their own. The horse, however, was changing the equation.

The Lakota had been accumulating horses, gradually trading for them, capturing them, and taking them in raids. And the horse was more than a means of transport. He was mobility, he was speed, it was hunting power, and it was a weapon. But in the 1760's, the Lakota was still operating in a dangerous world. The British had replaced the French as the dominant European power east of the Mississippi. British traders began pushing into the old French trade networks, and the Lakota leaders quickly recognized the opportunity.

In 1761, Sioux warriors were already making contact with the British at Fort Edward Augustus, a former French post at Green Bay. The message was clear. The French might have disappeared from the region, but gone had not, and the British were willing to provide them a Across the interior, however, war was already breaking out. Indigenous peoples had little reason to accept the transfer of French territories to the British.

The British victory had changed the balance of power without asking the people who actually lived on the land. The result was rebellion across the Great Lakes. In Ohio, Indigenous nations rose against the British in what became known as the Pontiac War. For the Lakota, the turmoil created both danger and opportunity. The 1760s were difficult years. The old French trading system had collapsed and the Lakota still had to compete with powerful neighbors for access to territory, horses and trade.

But just as they were adapting, then came crisis. In the early 1770s. Drought and shortage added pressure to peoples already competing for the resources of the plane. The Lakota responded as they so often had before. They moved, they haunted, they raided, and they fought. Their growing mastery of the horse allowed them to project power across distances that would have been almost impossible for foot bound warriors. A mounted Lakota war party could strike quickly and disappear in an instant.

The horse transformed the geography of warfare. But the Lakota needed more than horses. They needed guns. And once again, the political map of North America began to provide them with an opportunity. British traders were pushing deeper into the Great Lakes and other Mississippi networks. Firearms and manufactured goods began to flow through indigenous trading networks. Once again, the Lakota were increasingly able to combine the two technologies that were transforming the planes. The horse gave them ability.

The gun gave them firepower. Together they created some. I think far more formidable. The Lakota were becoming a mounted military power and their enemies were beginning to feel the consequences. During the 1770's the Lakota fought with people including the Pawnee and Crow. As they expanded their influence W the Black Hills became increasingly important to them. The Black Hills were rich in game and resources and occupied a position for which the Lakota could project their power across the surrounding plains.

But then in 1781, disaster struck. Smallpox swept through the northern plains. The disease did not spare the Lakota. Their winter counts record the suffering and death. But the consequences were even more devastating for the densely settled agricultural people of the Missouri River. The Mandan was struck with catastrophic losses. Their riccura were devastated. The Hidatsa suffered heavily. These were not simply villages. They were major political and economic powers. For generation, their fortified settlements had acted as a barrier to Lakota expansion across the Missouri. Now disease had shattered these barriers. The Lakota, whose mobile way of life meant they were less exposed to the disease than the people concentrated in large villages, were better placed to recover. Their enemies were not.

And as the balance of power in the northern Plains shifted dramatically, the Missouri River villages there had once been powerful centres of agriculture. Trade and warfare were weakened. The Lakota moved W they expanded across the plains, and where once the Missouri had been a barrier, it increasingly became a highway. The Lakota fought the Mandan and other Missouri River peoples, but warfare was only part of the story. They also traded.

They formed alliances and in some places they established relations with people such as the Erikura that could alternate between corporation and conflict. The result was not the destruction of the Missouri River trading system, it was its transformation. The Lakota were now becoming one of the powers that controlled it, and this was where their combination of horse and gun became so important. The horse allowed them to dominate the enormous spaces of the planes that Don gave them the firepower. The Buffalo gave them food, clothing, shelter and trade goods.

And the Missouri gave them access to the commercial networks that connected the interior to the wider world. For the first time, the Lakota were no longer simply trying to survive between competing powers of the East and West. They were becoming a power in their own right. And once again, events beyond the plane helped them. The struggle between France and Britain to dominate North America had lasted for centuries. Britain had paid an enormous price in blood and treasure to secure the future of its American possessions.

With the French menace at last crushed, the fruits of victory would be enjoyed by Britain's American subjects. With the American colonists being the main beneficiaries of Britain's triumph, the government in London felt it only reasonable that the 13 colonies, already the lowest taxed part of the British Empire, might contribute a few shillings to pay for the cost of the war. After all, King George's American subjects enjoyed liberties that his British subjects did not.

They elected their own assemblies. They levied many of their own taxes. They governed much of their own domestic affairs, and Britain had just forced a devastating war to defend them. The argument in London was therefore straightforward. The colonies were British subjects. Britain had defeated France, securing the colonies from French expansion and accumulating enormous debts doing so. It was hardly unreasonable from the British perspective to ask the colonies to contribute to the cost of an empire from which they benefited.

And London was not simply imposing British culture upon every corner of its newly expanded empire. In Canada, Britain took a remarkably lenient approach. The French speaking population of Quebec remained overwhelmingly Catholic, and rather than attempting to force Protestantism upon them, the British government recognized their rights to practice their faith. The Quebec Act of 1774 went further. It restored French civil law in Quebec, protected Catholic religious practices, and expanded the provinces territory into the interior. And crucially, Britain did not simply fold Quebec into the existing southern colonies.

It remained A distinct province under British rule. To London. This was pragmatic imperial government. Best to conquer a people once, and then to allow good government to show that the British are reasonable and well intended, and that the newly conquered French could thrive as loyal subjects of the British crown. Better to tolerate a little Roman potpourri and the smell of incense than that of the gunpowder of rebellion. But the Quebec Act caused outrage in the 13 colonies. Not only was Quebec extended further W into the Ohio Valley, blocking the ambitions of many colonists to a bonanza from trade they hope to reap, but tolerance of hated Catholicism offended Protestant sentiment.

The British also intended to rule Quebec without an elected assembly. Was this perhaps a vision of things to come? Was London intending to strip American colonists of their rights as Englishmen? The issue was no longer simply the amount of tax being paid, it was the principle of parliamentary authority. Could Parliament regulate the colonies? Could it tax them? Could the imperial government alter the constitutional relationship between Britain and its American subjects? The British government believed the answer had to be yes. If Parliament possessed authority over Britain but not over its colonies, the the empire itself could barely function.

The colonists increasingly believed the opposite, and what began as a constitutional dispute became a political crisis. By 1775, compromise was collapsing, and in 1776 the 13 colonies declared that they were no longer British. The American Revolution had begun, but the American Revolution created opportunities for the Sioux. The British, now at war with their American colonies, had every reason to look for allies in the frontier, and they saw one in the Sioux.

For the British, the Sioux were not simply another indigenous nation. They were a powerful military force positioned across a huge area of the northern plains, and the Sioux desperately needed what the British could provide Guns, powder, trade goods. The relationship was want of mutual interest. The British wanted allies against the Americans. The Sioux wanted firearms and access to the expanding trade networks of the North.

And as the American Revolution consumed the attention of Britain, France and Spain, guns continued to flow through indigenous trading networks across the plains. But it was not just trade goods that penetrated the interior. As armies of blue and red coated soldiers marched to war, invisible columns were cutting their way through the Americas with a much more deadly effect. The smallpox epidemic that swept across North America in the late 1770s eventually reached the northern Plains in 1781. The Lakota themselves was struck. For a people who'd spent generations moving across enormous distances, their mobility offered some protection.

But they could not escape the pox entirely, and the disease was about to transform the balance of power around them. The Lakota were not the only people living along the Missouri. There was the Mandan, the Hadasa and the Erikura, the sedatory agricultural societies whose villages have become some of the great trading centres of the northern plains. For generations these villages had sat at the meeting points of two world horses moving N from Spanish territory, guns moving W from the British, and the French and indigenous traders connected them together.

The Missouri villages were far from weak or backward. Quite the opposite. They were amongst the great commercial powers of the plains. But no matter how high their ramparts or thick their stockades, there was no fortification. Pathogens could not scale. In 1781, smallpox devastated the Mandan. The population was shattered. Villages were abandoned. Across the Missouri, the balance of power was changing. The Lakota had suffered, but the more sedentary people around them had suffered on a vastly greater scale.

The very societies that once stood between the Lakota and the upper Missouri trade networks, acting as a check on Lakota expansion, was suddenly weakened and a Lakota moved into the vacuum. They fought the man down, they fought other enemies, they traded with some, they allied with others, and gradually they began to carve out something that had never existed before, a Lakota domain stretching across the Missouri. The Missouri became a highway rather than a boundary. And the Lakota were no longer simply another people moving across the plains, they were becoming one of the dominant powers and now they had access to one of the great arteries of the continent.

The imperial powers had spent generations fighting over North America, and whilst Europeans were looking in every direction except the plains, the Lakota were building their own power. With the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, the outcome of the American Revolution was effectively decided. The decades between the 1760s and 1780s had seen the power dynamics of North America utterly transformed. The Lakota and the broader Sioux nations had long possessed the advantage of numbers.

But numbers alone were not enough press between rival British and French interests. Confronted by well armed indigenous enemies to the east and entrenched neighbors to the West, their expansion had been repeatedly checked. They had struggled to turn their numerical advantage into military power. They lacked reliable access to to the horses and firearms necessary to protect power across the plains. But now everything had changed.

The French had been defeated by the British in the 1760's, the British were weakened and distracted by rebellion in the 1770s, and indigenous neighbors who had once dominated the Missouri were devastated by smallpox in the 1780s. As the restraints on Lakota power began to crumble, the Lakota were working to overcome the disadvantages that had held them back. They raided for horses. They expanded their access to firearms, and the great wars between European empires pushed evermore weapons and trade goods into the plains. For the first time, the Lakota were able to combine the things that he did the most mobility, firepower, numbers, and the Buffalo.

And as the old imperial order collapsed around them, the Lakota rose. In 1776, as American colonists gathered in Philadelphia and declared their independence, the Lakota were establishing their dominance. Across the Black Hills. 2 great peoples on the same landmass were declaring themselves to the world's two nations whose future would become intertwined. 2 nations that would help ship the future of a continent. Would these peoples become neighbors and friends, sharing the fruits of their vast land?

Or would they be set on a collision course from which only one could emerge? Thank you for listening to Ancient to Recent, My name is Joseph Parkinson. To support the show, subscribe today and leave a comment or rating. Episodes of Ancient to Recent are out every Saturday and are available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.