The Rise of the Lakota — Part 2

These are the bilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the Pirates of the Missouri, until such measures are pursued by our government as will make them feel a dependence on it's will for their supply of merchandise. William Clark, Speaking of the Lakota, eighteen of four. The Napoleon Bonaparte history was a blank page, and he intended to be it's author. He dreamed of vast empires, sweeping realms, a dominion that stretched across the mountains and oceans, carried forth by his undefeated legions to make the world again in his image, from the banks of the Nile to the frozen steppes of Russia, none could escape his vision of imperial glory. France may have lost most of her possessions in North America to Britain a decade before he was born, but Napoleon still imagined a restoration of French imperial power in the Americas. And crucially, France had not lost all of her colonies on the other side of the Atlantic.

St. de Mang, present day Haiti, along with a chain of French islands in the Caribbean, was still in French hands. These islands, with their sugar and coffee plantations worked by the toiling masses of enslaved Africans, were amongst the most profitable colonies in the world. But France's colonies had not been spared the fever dream of the French Revolution, and soon Saint de Mang was itself in a state of insurrection. Initially professing their loyalty to Paris, the revolutionaries of Saint de Man, led by a former slave, Toussaint l'ouverture, soon sought to throw off French imperial domination.

But Napoleon was not going to let the richest colony in the world slip from his grasp. A massive Armada was gathered with 10s of thousands of soldiers to restore French imperial power on the tiny island on the other side of the world. Napoleon hoped to make St. Domingue the linchpin of a new French empire in the Americas. He dreamed of a vast French speaking domain West of the Mississippi. In this dream, Napoleon had an unlikely ally, France's imperial rival, Spain.

Spain had been the first European power to carve out an empire in the Americas, but by the turn of the 19th century, the Spanish Empire was already in decline. Louisiana, acquired in 1762 from the French at the Treaty of Fontainebleau, had become more of a burden than a prize. The territory was vast, difficult to defend, and increasingly threatened by the expanding United States. American settlers were pushing W towards the Mississippi, whilst Washington openly dreamed of eventually reaching the Pacific.

Spain could neither populate Louisiana nor adequately defend it, so Madrid decided that if Louisiana was going to be difficult to hold, perhaps the answer was to let it go. Instead, Spain would hand it back to France. France could serve as a buffer between the United States and Spain's remaining possessions in North America, especially Tejas and the road to Mexico. The arrangement was completed in 1800, and from Napoleon's perspective, it was perfect.

France would once again possess Louisiana. With New Orleans controlling access to the Mississippi and San de Man providing the wealth to finance his ambitions, Napoleon could begin rebuilding French power in the Americas. Except there was one problem. San de Mang was still in open rebellion, and in the heat of the Caribbean, Napoleon's army was dying of disease. Yellow fever tore through the French expedition sent to crush the Revolution.

The colony could not be brought back under French control, and once Sanderman was lost, Napoleon's grand American project began to collapse. Louisiana, suddenly was exactly the burden to the French. It had been to the Spanish. And once again the fate of this enormous territory was up for grabs. The United States was watching closely. Washington feared that France abandoned Louisiana. Britain might take it's place. So in early 18 O three, President Jefferson dispatched James Monroe to Paris with instructions to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans. Monroe arrived expecting to bargain. Instead, Napoleon had prepared his own offer, all of Louisiana around 828,000 square miles for the poultry son of $15 million. The American delegation didn't need to think twice. Going once, going twice, going three times. Sold to the man in the powdered wig. With a stroke of a pen, the territory of the United States doubled in size.

Or at least it did on paper, because there was a problem. The United States had just purchased Louisiana from France, but soon the Americans would discover Louisiana had not been Francis to sell. The Louisiana Purchase was the real estate deal of the Millennium, but there was a number of rather important problems with the transaction. The United States had just purchased an area that didn't actually exist. Louisiana itself was a fiction, an I'll defined region on a barely explored map that existed in the minds of imperial powers alone.

The great empires of the time may have swapped title indeed, but none of these states actually controlled the land. Nor, for that matter, was Louisiana empty. The land was heavily populated by hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples from numerous Native Nations communities who had been living, trading, fighting, and negotiating across the region for generations. And amongst the most powerful of these people were the Lakota. The Americans had purchased a vast territory on paper. They would now have to discover what it meant to control it. In reality, because the Louisiana Purchase did not magically make the United States sovereign over the people living around the Mississippi.

For the Lakota, the idea that some distant government had simply bought the land they lived upon would have seemed almost incomprehensible. And yet now, with the approval of the European powers and the blessing of Washington, American settlers were on the way. First came the traders. St. Louis was becoming the gateway to the new American West, and the old French influence had not simply disappeared with the transfer of sovereignty.

French remained an important language of commerce in the region, and French speaking traders already knew the rivers, the villages, and the indigenous people who controlled the trade routes. The Americans were entering a world that Europeans had been visiting for generations, but they were entering it with a new ambition. They did not merely want to trade, they wanted to know what they had bought. But before the new American government could probably begin mapping its vast acquisitions, an old enemy reappeared. Disease.

In the early years of the 19th century, smallpox once again swept through the communities of the upper Missouri. The epidemics of the early 19th century were part of a recurring pattern of disease that followed expanding connections between indigenous communities and the wider Atlantic world. The peoples of the plains have no natural immunity to diseases that had evolved in the densely populated societies of Europe, Africa and Asia. And when disease arrived, it did not respect. Borders suffered.

So did their neighbors. So did indigenous peoples across the Missouri country. For the Lakota, this was yet another reminder that the world around them was changing. Trade was bringing guns, metal goods, horses and other commodities. It was also bringing pathogens. And the consequences could be just as transformative. The Missouri River was becoming an increasingly important artery connecting the interior to Saint Louis.

Trade meant opportunity, but it also meant that disease could travel along the same routes as the traders, and the balance of power on the upper Missouri was already changing. The Arikara, once one of the great powers of the Missouri trade, had been repeatedly battered by warfare and epidemic disease. Their villages remained important centres of commerce, but the demographic world in which they once flourished was changing, and every weakening of arrival created an opportunity for another power.

The Lakota were watching. For generations they had been moving W Now the Missouri River, the trade routes and the changing fortunes of their neighbors were opening new possibilities. the United States thought it bought Louisiana, but the Lakota were about to demonstrate something far more important. The future of the West would not be decided simply by what was written on a piece of paper in Washington. He would be decided by the people who already lived there. Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States of America, was elected in 1801.

He was a Virginia planter, revolutionary hero, one of the great minds of the American War of Independence, and lifelong slave owner. Jefferson was eager to secure American control of Louisiana, but buying the territory was one thing. Making the United States a reality beyond the Mississippi was another. In 1803, even as the ink was drying on the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson was already considering what the future of indigenous Americans might look like.

His long term vision was increasingly one of removing indigenous peoples from the expanding American heartland and pushing them further West. But for now, Jefferson needed something rather different. He needed allies, and amongst the peoples he needed to cultivate were the Lakota. Jefferson's answer was an expedition. Mary, with Lewis and William Clark were sent to explore the new territory, map its rivers and resources, establish American claims, and, crucially, make contact with the peoples who already control the land. They were not simply explorers.

They were diplomats, intelligence gatherers, and representatives of the new American power. And they went prepared. They carried gifts, medals, trade goods, alcohol and tobacco, and a message to the Indians, as Lewis and Clark called native peoples from their father in Washington. the United States, they would explain, came in peace. It wished to trade. It wished to protect its new friends, and whether their hosts realized it or not, the Americans were to make clear that this vast territory now belonged to the United States.

After more than two months of travelling, Lewis and Clark reached the James River on August the 29th. They encountered a large gathering of indigenous peoples. They were yanked and Sioux. The Americans presented gifts and medals. The Yanktons accepted them. To Lewis and Clark, this could be interpreted as the beginning of a relationship in which the United States would become the great power at the centre of the region.

But the Yanktons had their own understanding of what had happened. They were entering into a diplomatic and commercial relationship. They were not, in their minds, surrendering their independence. This distinction would become one of the great recurring tragedies of American expansion. A gift could mean friendship to one side and submission to the other. A promise of protection could mean an alliance to 1 people and sovereignty to another. Neither side necessarily understood what the other believed.

They had just agreed. Lewis and Clark continued West and by September, remember, they had reached the Great Plains. Here the character of their journey changed. The landscape opened before them, the forests gave way to grasslands stretching towards the horizon, and somewhere beyond these horizons were a people the Americans would soon discover they could not simply charm into submission the Lakota. This was Lewis and Clark's first direct encounter with Lakota peoples, and it very nearly ended the expedition. The Americans attempted diplomacy. There was tobacco, there was whiskey, there were gifts, there were speeches.

But beneath the ceremony was something far more serious. The Lakota understood that another power had arrived on their river, a power claiming authority over lands. The Lakota did not agree to surrender. The Americans believed they were offering friendship and protection. The Lakota did not necessarily see it that way. The tension escalated, and at the centre of the confrontation was a Lakota to leader known as Black Bull. For a moment, diplomacy threatened to collapse into violence.

Lewis and Clark had travelled thousands of miles into territory they barely understood. And now, within sight of the Lakota, their expedition was in danger of ending, not with a triumphant return to Washington, but with their bodies left somewhere on the Great plain. Had Lewis and Clark been killed, the consequences could have been enormous. the United States would have lost its most important expedition into the newly acquired W American knowledge of the interior would have been delayed.

Its ability to establish relations and trade networks beyond the Mississippi would have been weakened. And Britain, still powerful in North America, would have gained more time to maintain and expand its own influence. American expansion was not inevitable. It was a contest, and the Lakota were one of the powers standing in the way. But there was something else Lewis and Clark had discovered. The indigenous peoples of Missouri country did not necessarily want to reject the Americans. Quite the opposite.

Many wanted to incorporate the newcomers into existing trade networks. They wanted access to American goods, particularly manufactured goods and firearms. They wanted to know the trading partner, but they wanted to do so on their own terms. The Americans, however, often interpreted resistance to their diplomatic overtures very differently. What indigenous leaders saw as the defence of their independence could be interpreted by American officials as in gratitude towards the generous protection being offered by the United States. And Lewis and Clark were about to learn just how powerful the Lakota were.

The Lakota were not simply another group of people scattered across the plains. They were emerging as the dominant power in much of the region. They controlled access to important stretches of the Missouri. They possessed horses. They possessed firearms. They had warriors capable of projecting power over enormous distances. And they had something perhaps even more important, a growing political and economic network linked to their wider indigenous world. If the United States wanted to dominate Missouri trade, it would have to deal with the Lakota. If it wanted American traders to travel safely along the river, it would need Lakota cooperation. Or if cooperation was not forthcoming, then the Lakota would have to be crushed.

And that meant that the Americans would need allies of their own, the Uricura, the Mandan, the Hitanse, and other peoples of the Missouri country. For the United States to dominate the river, he would have to build a network of alliances strong enough to counterbalance the people who already dominated it. But Lewis and Clark had discovered the uncomfortable truth. the United States may have purchased Louisiana for pennies, but the Lakota were not for sale. The Lakota had no interest in being discovered. They had even less interest in being civilized, and they certainly had no intention of being protected by the Americans.

They already had their own societies, their own political relationships, and their own understanding of who possessed power on the great plain. The Americans had arrived believing they were bringing the benefits of civilization into the wilderness. The Lakota saw it very differently, another foreign power attempting to impose itself upon them, and Lewis and Clark's frustration soon began to color their description of the Lakota.

They portrayed the Lakota as aggressive, warlike in predatory, and there was undoubtedly violence in Lakota expansion. But there was another reason for the hostility of the American accounts. The Lakota simply refused to accept the role the Americans had assigned to them. They would not become subjects, they would not accept American authority, and they would not allow Washington to dictate who would trade in the Missouri.

Instead, the Lakota continued to expand their own influence. Their neighbors were coming under increased pressure. The Mandan and Hitachi had already been weakened by warfare and epidemic disease, including devastating outbreaks of smallpox and whooping cough. Their position along the Missouri was becoming increasingly precarious, and Washington was beginning to understand the problem. If the Lakota were becoming the dominant power in the Missouri, then the United States needed to find a way to counter them.

But Jefferson's government faced another problem. the United States had only just acquired Louisiana. American authority was still extremely weak, and enormous distances separated Washington from the people who actually control the interior. Even the men supposedly representing American authority could not always be trusted, and one of the most extraordinary examples was General James Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a senior American military officer who in 18 O3 travelled to New Orleans to take command of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.

But Wilkinson had a secret. For years, he had been working as a covert agent for the Spanish crown. He'd been recruited by Spanish officials in 1787 and given the code name Agent 13. For more than a decade, he had supplied Madrid with information about American plans and ambitions. Now he was being placed in command of the very territory the United States had just acquired. Wilkinson's loyalties were not simply divided between two countries.

He also pursued his own interests. He saw the western interior as an opportunity to make money, acquire influence, and build his own political power. And Wilkinson was hardly alone. The frontier attracted traders, speculators, adventurers and politicians who saw the expansion of the United States not simply as a national project, but as an opportunity for personal wealth. The American government therefore faced A fundamental problem. It had claimed an enormous territory, but it did not yet control it.

And whilst Washington was struggling to establish its authority, the Lakota were becoming increasingly aware that the arrival of the Americans represented something more than another opportunity for trade. the United States was becoming a threat. The Americans wanted access to the Missouri. They wanted their traders protected. They wanted to establish relationships with the indigenous nations of the interior. And ultimately, they wanted those nations to recognize American authority.

The Lakota had other ideas. If the United States was going to become another power on the Missouri, then the Lakota needed to decide how to deal with it. And they had an obvious model. They had been watching the Europeans compete for influence in North America for generations. The British, French, and Spanish had all attempted to cultivate indigenous allies. They supplied weapons, They offered trade, They exchanged gifts.

They promised protection. And indigenous nations had learned to exploit these rivalries for their own purposes. Now the Americans had entered the game, and the Lakota could play the same game with them. If Washington wanted to use American trade to increase its influence, the Lakota could use American trade to strengthen themselves. If the Americans wanted alliances, the Lakota could cultivate their own relationships. And if a another European power was willing to help balance American expansion, and there was no reason for the Lakota to ignore the opportunity, there was one obvious candidate Great Britain.

The British still possessed enormous influence across the northern interior. Their merchants had spent generations developing relationships with Indigenous nations, and British trade networks stretched from Canada deep into the continent. The Americans feared precisely this possibility. If Britain could establish a powerful alliance with the Indigenous nations of the interior, American expansion West of the Mississippi could be contained. And by 1805, the possibility was beginning to take shape. The Sioux began exploring the possibility of closer relations with the British.

The idea was extraordinary. Indigenous nations could unite against the expanding United States whilst using British trade, weapons and political influence to strengthen their position. The Lakota did not need to defeat Beat America alone. They could make American expansion far more difficult by ensuring the United States face resistance from a network of indigenous powers backed by a European rival. For Washington, this was precisely the nightmare it had feared. the United States had spent years worrying that Britain, France or Spain might establish themselves behind the indigenous peoples of the interior. Now the Lakota were beginning to understand that the rivalries of the great empires could be turned to their own advantage. The Americans had watched European powers fight over North America for generations.

Now indigenous nations could use the same rivalries against the Americans. Though Washington was not standing still. the United States began restricting foreign trade along the Mississippi. American military posts appeared on the frontier. Government officials began cultivating relationships with the Mandan, the Hitachi Aricura and other nations who could provide a counterweight to the Lakota. The strategy was becoming clear.

America did not necessarily need to defeat the Lakota immediately. It could surround them. Strengthen their rivals, control the flow of trade, and gradually transform American influence into American power. The Louisiana Purchase had therefore begun to take on a very different meaning. In Washington, it was still described as a vast acquisition of territory. On the Missouri, however, the reality was becoming clearer.

the United States had entered an existing political world, and it was only one of several powers competing within it. The Americans had their forts. The traders had their goods. The British had their commercial networks. The indigenous nations had their own alliances, territories and armies. And at the centre of this increasingly complicated struggle stood the Lakota. They had no intention of allowing the Americans to dictate the future of the Missouri.

But the Americans were learning too. If the Lakota could use rival empires against the United States, Washington could use the Lakota's rivals against them. The contest for the West was no longer simply a question of who owned the land. It was becoming a struggle over trade, alliances and power. For Jefferson, establishing American control was becoming a matter of urgency. The Americans could not allow Britain to establish itself through an alliance of indigenous nations on the western frontier. Nor could they afford to leave the interior to ambitious men like Wilkinson, whose secret dealings with the Spanish demonstrated just how fragile American control of Louisiana remained.

Washington needed to know what was happening on the ground. Who controlled the rivers? Who controlled the trade? Which indigenous nations were friends of the United States and which were enemies? And perhaps most importantly, how powerful were the Lakota? Jefferson had already sent Lewis and Clark to begin answering these questions. Now another young army officer was sent W his name was Zebulon Pike. Pikes orders were to explore the Mississippi and its tributaries, gather intelligence and strengthen American influence amongst the indigenous peoples of the newly acquired territory. But there was another purpose.

Land Pike was instructed to negotiate with Indigenous nations and, where possible, acquire territory for the United States. It was an extraordinary proposition. The Americans believed they had purchased Louisiana from France, but France's claim existed in name only, and the idea that the land the Lakota lived on was Napoleon's to sell would have raised a few Lakota eyebrows. And now Washington was attempting to transform an imperial transaction between European powers into American sovereignty over an entire continent.

Pike would therefore enter the West carrying two things the authority of the United States and the assumption that this authority should be recognized. And he was not simply an explorer. He was a representative of an expanding empire, and he was entering a world where treaties, diplomacy and land ownership meant very different things to the people on either side of the negotiating table. For Washington, such treaties could mean the transfer of territory. For an indigenous nation, the same agreement might establish a relationship, secure access to trade, or create an alliance. The two sides could therefore leave the same meeting believing they had agreed to very different things. The Americans were thinking in terms of sovereignty. The peoples of the Plains were thinking in terms of relationships.

And Pike was about to discover that the difference mattered because the United States was not entering an empty wilderness. It was entering a continent divided between peoples with their own territories, economies, alliances and enemies. And at the centre of the American problem was the same power that had frustrated Lewis and Clark, the Lakota. By now their influence stretched across enormous areas of the northern Plains. They controlled important sections of the Missouri trade Route.

They could mobilize warriors over vast distances. And they had little reason to welcome an American government that was simultaneously restricting foreign trade, establishing military posts, and attempting to surround them with rival indigenous nations. Pike was therefore entering A diplomatic battlefield. The Americans wanted to turn the Missouri into an American highway. The Lakota wanted to keep control of their own commercial world. Washington wanted to establish sovereignty. The Lakota wanted to preserve their independence, and somewhere in the middle stood the traders, because whoever controlled the trade control the flow of guns, ammunition, metal goods, and wealth.

And this was where the American strategy became particularly clever. Washington did not necessarily need to defeat the Lakota immediately. It needed to make the Lakota increasingly dependent upon American trade while strengthening their enemies, the Mandan, the Hitatsay, the Aricura, and other indigenous nations along the Missouri. If American traders could establish themselves amongst these people, and American force could protect those trade networks, the United States could begin to challenge Lakota dominance without immediately fighting a war. Pike was part of that strategy.

He was there to explore, to negotiate, to gather intelligence, and to plant the flag. But as he travelled W, he discovered that American power was still remarkably thin. the United States might possess Louisiana on the map, but beyond the Mississippi, the map was beginning to encounter reality. And the reality belonged to the people already living there. The Americans had bought an empire, and now they had to figure out how to rule it.

When Lewis and Clark returned to Saint Louis in September, 18 O six, they brought with them something almost as valuable as the maps they had drawn stories. Stories of vast forests and enormous herds of Buffalo. Stories of rivers stretching thousands of miles into the continent. Stories of mountains, Beavers, and furs. Stories of a country whose potential seemed almost limitless. For the businessmen of Saint Louis, the expedition had not simply mapped a new territory.

It had revealed an opportunity opportunity, and they intended to exploit it. Within months, traders were preparing to follow the route Lewis and Clark had opened. In eighteen O 7, Manuel Lisa LED one of the first major American trading expeditions of the Missouri. He eventually established Fort Raymond at the junction of the Yellowstone and Bighorn River, opening a permanent American trading presence deep inside the country. the United States had only recently claimed. The following year saw more expeditions, more boats, more traders, more goods, and more Americans attempting to push into the indigenous trade networks of the Missouri. But there was a problem.

The Missouri was not an American highway. It was an indigenous highway, and much of it passed through a world of which the Lakota possessed an enormous influence. The American soon discovered that travelling up the river was not simply a matter of loading a keelboat and pointing at West The Lakota could stop them. They could demand payment. They can question where the traders were going and what they were carrying. And, crucially, they could decide who was allowed to trade with whom.

This was not necessarily a rejection of commerce. It was commerce on Lakota terms. The Lakota had been participating in complex trading relations long before the arrival of the United States. They understood that European and American goods were valuable. They understood that guns, ammunition, metal tools, and other manufactured goods could strengthen their position. And they understood something the Americans were only beginning to appreciate. Trade was power.

If the Lakota could control access to the river, they could influence who received American goods. And perhaps even more importantly, who did not? Their relationship with Erika, Mandan and Hitachi made this particularly important. These nations were themselves major centres of trade along the Missouri, but they were also rivals of the Lakota, and warfare between them could turn commerce into a battlefield. For the Americans, this created a dilemma. They wanted to trade with the people of the upper Missouri, but the Lakota could make that difficult. If American traders carried guns and ammunition to the Lakota's enemies, the Lakota had every reason to object. And if American traders attempted to ignore them, they risked having their boats stopped and their goods seized. The Americans increasingly complained that the Lakota were holding American commerce hostage. But there was another way of looking at it. The Lakota was simply treating the Americans as they had treated other traders. the United States had arrived in their world claiming to have purchased the land and also demanding the right to set the rules. The Lakota responded by demonstrating the possession of a piece of paper in Washington did not give the Americans control of the Missouri.

The Lakota were not trying to understand American concepts of sovereignty. They were negotiating with another foreign power as sovereign equals, and they were doing so from a position of considerable strength. This became increasingly obvious as a American traders pushed farther up river. Manuel Lisa returned in 1809 with a much larger expedition and established another trading post in the Mandan and Hitachi villages.

The Missouri Fur Company was formed, bringing together some of the most important merchants and traders in Saint Louis, including William Clark. American commercial ambitions were becoming more organized. The isolated traders were being replaced by companies with capital, boats and employees, and permanent posts. But the more substantial the American presence became, the more important Lakota cooperation was. A trading post was only useful if traders could reach it. A boat was only useful if it could traverse the rivers, and American goods were only useful if the Lakota allowed them to circulate.

The Lakota were reshaping the region around themselves. They were not merely reacting to American expansion. They were deciding how and even if American expansion would take place. And some Lakota leaders proved extraordinary at this new political world. Lakota chiefs understood the value of diplomacy and the value of intimidation. They also understood that the arrival of American traders created opportunities as well as threats. The Americans were discovering that they could not simply replace the existing political order. Instead, they were new players in an old game, and one for which they were but one of many competing powers. The stories of gullible native peoples, bamboozled by American trinkets and willing to trade their land away for beads are just that, stories told to make native peoples look foolish, childish, doomed, and in need of American benevolence. The reality is that native peoples were often led by wily chiefs, men who knew their worth and their power, leaders who drove hard bargains, played the European powers off each other, and ruthlessly pursued their own interests. In 1811, the situation became even more complicated. Another American trade expedition headed up the Missouri.

This time it was not simply Manuel Lisa. John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company had sent an expedition W under Wilson Price Hunt. The expedition was entering the same commercial world that Lisa's Missouri Fur Company was attempting to dominate. The Lakota encountered Hunt's party on the Missouri, and once again the question was not simply whether Americans were allowed to travel upriver, it was what they were carrying. The Lakota were particularly concerned that firearms and ammunitions might reach their enemies, including the Aricura and Mandan.

The Americans were beginning to discover that the Lakota were not merely controlling the territory, they were attempting to control the strategic balance of power across the region. For the Lakota, this made perfect sense. A trader carrying guns was not simply a merchant, he was an armist dealer. And an American trading post was not simply a commercial center. It could become a permanent source of weapons, wealth, and political influence.

The Lakota therefore had every reason to watch the Americans closely, and the Americans had every reason to watch the Lakota. By now, the Missouri had become a political chess board. the United States wanted to build commercial networks reaching deep into the continent. The Lakota wanted to preserve their dominance over the networks that already existed. The Ikaro, Mandan and Hitachi wanted to protect their own interests, and Britain remained in the background. For Washington, the possibility of British influence amongst the indigenous peoples of the interior remains deeply troubling. the United States has spent years worrying that Britain might use its commercial connections with indigenous nations to contain American expansion. Now that fear was becoming increasingly important because the Lakota did not need to defeat the United States alone. They could trade with the Americans whilst maintaining relations with the British.

They could negotiate with one empire was resisting the other, and they could use the rivalry between great powers to strengthen their own position. This was the great transformation taking place on the Great Plains. The Lakota were learning how to operate in a world increasingly dominated by competing empires. The Americans had imagined that the Louisiana Purchase had created a new American West. But the Lakota were creating something of their own.

A world in which the Missouri River became a Lakota sphere of influence. A world in which neighboring nations were pushed, absorbed, or challenged. A world in which American traders were welcomed when they were useful and obstructed when they threatened Lakota interests. And a world where the United States of America did not end indigenous politics, but rather made it more important. In 1812, simmering tensions between Great Britain and the United States boiled over into war. The causes of the war were numerous. American sailors were being impressed into the Royal Navy, British restrictions were interfering with American trade, American leaders wanted to defend what they regarded as their rights as a neutral trading nation, and Washington looked to absorb the British colonies in present day Canada. But there was another issue that mattered enormously on the frontier Indigenous resistance.

For years, American settlers had been pushing into Indigenous territory, and in the Old Northwest, a remarkable movement had emerged to resist American expansion. The alliance was led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. Tecumseh understood something that few indigenous leaders have been able to comprehend. The Americans were not simply fighting individual nations. They were steadily advancing against indigenous people across an enormous area.

If each indigenous people fought alone, eventually each would be defeated alone. But if they could unite, they might be able to create something capable of stopping American expansion. Tecumseh therefore attempted to build a confederation stretching across much of the interior. His message was simple. The land did not belong to individual nations to sell. It belonged collectively to the indigenous people who had inherited it.

And if the Americans were allowed to continue buying territory 1 nation at a time, eventually there would be no left for native peoples. By 1811, Tecumseh's movement had become a serious threat. When Britain and the United States went to war in 1812, the comes to allied himself with the British. For Britain, indigenous allies were strategically valuable. The British had far fewer troops in North America than the United States could potentially mobilize. Indigenous warriors knew the terrain. They could move quickly, they could gather intelligence, and they could attack American positions across an enormous frontier.

For Tekumpser and his allies, the British offered something else Weapons, trade goods, and potentially the military support necessary to prevent the United States from swallowing yet more indigenous territory. The result was one of the largest indigenous military coalitions ever assembled in North America. But the Lakota were watching all of this from a very different position. They were not facing the Americans from a position of desperation. They were enjoying the fruits of generations of expansion. They had horses.

They had guns. They controlled enormous stretches of the plains, they had access to Missouri trade, and American traders increasingly depended upon their cooperation. Why then, would the Lakota risk everything by joining a war? The Americans certainly feared they might. Rumours circulated that indigenous nations were preparing to close rivers to American traders. British agents were distributing gifts and weapons, and Washington understood the nightmare scenario could be upon them.

If the indigenous peoples of the Interior united with Great Britain, American expansion could be stopped in its tracks. The Mississippi might become a barrier rather than a highway, American traders would be driven back to Saint Louis, and British influence would become entrenched across the interior. the United States had spent the previous decades trying to prevent precisely this scenario. Now it seemed the nightmare might be coming true. But there was an important difference. The Mississippi and the Missouri country were not the same strategic theatre as the Great Lakes. The Lakota had their own interests. For them, the War of 1812 was not simply a choice between Britain and America.

It was a question of what war would do for Lakota power. The Lakota had spent years of fighting their neighbors. They had fought for access to territory. They had fought over trade. They had expanded across the plains. And now they were enjoying a period in which their power was greater than it had ever been. Why risk it all in another war between the Americans and a European power? Both the Americans and the British could be useful trade partners.

The Lakota saw no need to choose which empire to submit to. They could deal with both. And this is one of the fundamental differences between how the Lakota and the Americans understood the frontier. Washington tended to think in terms of allegiances. Who is with America, who is against America, and who recognized American sovereignty? The Lakota were thinking in terms of relationship, who could provide guns, who could provide goods, who could threaten their enemies, who could be useful and who could be kept at arm's length. They had played this game with European powers before. Now they were playing it with Britain and the United States. The Americans therefore worked hard to keep the Lakota out of the war.

William Clark, now one of the most important American officials dealing with indigenous peoples, helped arrange a delegation of indigenous leaders to travel to Washington in 1812. The message from President James Madison was unmistakable. the United States knew that British agents were attempting to turn indigenous peoples against the Americans. Madison urged the indigenous delegates not to listen to the British, and the Lakota representatives gave assurances that they did not intend to make war on the United States. But there was a qualification.

The Americans could not assume that every Lakota band would necessarily follow the same course because the Lakota were not a centralized state. They were a collection of bands of political communities with their own leaders and their own interests. And the same was true across the wider Sioux world. Some Sioux communities moved towards the British. The Dakota, particularly with their long established connections to British traders, became important British allies and fought alongside British forces. But the Missouri Lakota largely stayed out of the conflict or maintained their own relationship with the United States.

This was not because they suddenly became enthusiastic proponents of American expansion. It was because neutrality served Lakota interests best. The war gave them another opportunity to demonstrate their own independence. They could refuse to fight for the Americans without fighting the Americans. They could maintain trade. They could continue expanding their influence. For the Lakota, there was little reason to abandon a position of strength.

For the United States, the War of 1812 was meant to be a foregone conclusion. A mere matter of marching was former President Jefferson's assessment on the eve of the conflict. After all, Britain was distracted fighting Napoleon. There were few British troops in North America. Fewer still could be spared from the European theatre of war, and the British and French subjects of Canada would surely welcome liberation at the hands of their southern neighbors. But the Canadians were not looking to be liberated by the Americans.

Yet the United States confidently looked forward to a swift and inevitable victory. The USA was a young Republic with a rapidly expanding population and enormous ambition, and had Providence itself not selected the United States as its chosen people? Victory, so the American leaders told themselves, was assured. If Providence had chosen the Americans, then she had failed to run the plan. Passed His Majesty's Government and within weeks the campaign was going badly wrong for the United States.

In August 1812, the British occupied Detroit. At the Battle of Queenston Heights in October, British forces routed the Americans in the first major battle of the war, and at the Battle of Chrysler's Farm in November 1813, heavily outnumbered British forces decisively defeated the Americans, ending US ambitions to annex Canada. The American invasion of Canada was repulsed. British and Indigenous forces captured American positions, and across the frontier, Indigenous warriors repeatedly demonstrated that American power was not as overwhelming as Washington had assumed. the United states was discovering that the conquest of North America was far from inevitable, but the British faced their own problems they were fighting Napoleon, and this was not some minor imperial squabble in a far off land.

Britain had been at war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France almost continuously since 1793. The struggle had consumed enormous quantities of British money, ships and soldiers, and by 1812 the fate of Europe was still uncertain. For Britain, North America mattered, but the battle with Napoleon was an existential conflict to be fought to the death. The British objective was therefore not necessarily the destruction of the United States.

It was to protect Canada, contain American expansion, and force Washington to abandon its immediate war aims. And that meant that the Western theatre was always of secondary concern to British policy makers. On the 24th of June 1812, only six days after the US declaration of war against Britain, Napoleon's legions crossed into Russia. The Emperor was certain he would force the Russians to do battle, and with a decisive victory, Russia would join the ranks of defeated nations bent to Napoleon's imperial will. But Napoleon faced the greatest general of them all. Not Katusov, not Wellington, but General Winter. And in the depths of the Russian wilderness, the invincible legions of France froze and starved. The Grand Arme was destroyed.

Napoleon's empire began to unravel, and over the next two years, the British and their allies drove the French back across Europe. By 1814, Napoleon was defeated and forced to abdicate. Napoleon's downfall had profound effects on the war in North America. Suddenly, Britain no longer had to concentrate the overwhelming majority of its military resources on the European continent. For the Americans, this was bad news. Britain now had the ability to send experienced troops across the Atlantic.

These troops included veterans of the campaigns against Napoleon, men who had spent years fighting across the Iberian peninsula. The balance of war was about to change. Britain already possessed the world's most powerful Navy. Now it could devote more attention to the United States. The British blockade tightened. British troops attacked across the American coast, and in August 1814, British forces marched into Washington.

The capital was captured. The White House and other government buildings were put to the torch. For a young Republic that had expected an easy victory, the humiliation was enormous. But the war was not fought to a finish. The fighting was costly for both sides, and the Americans themselves enjoyed victories over the British on the high seas and at the Battle of Baltimore checking British advances. Both sides had reasons to seek peace.

Britain had been at war for decades and was exhausted. Decisive victory over the United States would require a vast and costly deployment of troops, and even then would be unlikely. the United States was also eager to negotiate. the US was on the verge of bankruptcy, aware its opponent could summon much greater military resources, and the war was so unpopular that several American states openly spoke of secession. Neither side had achieved A decisive victory, and neither side had much to gain from continuing the war indefinitely.

Negotiations began against in the Austrian Netherlands. American and British diplomats attempted to end the conflict, but there was a problem. The indigenous nations that had fought alongside the British were not represented as an equal party. Britain had entered the war partly because of its own interests in North America. The indigenous peoples had entered the war because their own lands and political independence was at stake.

Those interests, but not necessarily the same. And now Britain was preparing to make peace without it's indigenous allies. The British initially pushed for the creation of an indigenous buffer state between the United States and British North America. It would have protected indigenous territory from further American expansion and created a permanent barrier between the two powers. But the proposal failed. The Americans would never accept it, and Britain, exhausted after two decades of war with France, was unwilling to continue fighting indefinitely to impose such an outcome.

On Christmas Eve 1814, Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Ghent. The treaty essentially restored the pre war boundaries. Neither side gained the great territorial prize. As it expected, Britain kept Canada, the United States remained independent and the war was over. But for the indigenous peoples who had fought so hard, the consequences were very different. The treaty did not create the independent indigenous buffer state the British had discussed.

It did not establish permanent protection for indigenous territory. And it did not give the indigenous nations who fought alongside Britain a seat at the negotiating table. The British had needed their warriors during the war. Now the war was over. the United States had failed to achieve any of its objectives on the battlefield, with the largest US victory of the war coming at New Orleans two weeks after the war had ended.

But at the negotiating table, US diplomats extracted a concession that would have a profound effect on the native peoples of North America. In return for an end to US attempts to annex Canada, the United Kingdom would no longer supply indigenous peoples with arms to block western expansion of the United States. The Lakota had sat out the War of 1812, and in doing so they had preserved the political and economic power they had spent decades building.

They had not defeated the United States, but they had also not submitted to it. The Americans had discovered that they could not simply March into the plains and impose their will. The Lakota controlled the trade routes, possessed powerful military forces, and had built relationships with indigenous nations and European powers that allowed them to resist American pressure. For a time, the balance held. But the world around the Lakota was changing. The British had failed to create a permanent indigenous barrier against American expansion.

Tecumseh's dream of a great indigenous confederation had collapsed, and with the Treaty of Ghent, Britain effectively accepted that the United States would continue expanding westward. The great imperial contest that had dominated North America for generations was coming to an end. France was gone. Spain's grip was weakening. Britain remained powerful. But it's interest increasingly lay elsewhere. And standing in the middle of the continent was the United States, a young Republic that had doubled its territory almost overnight. A Republic whose population was growing, whose trade was pushing for the West, whose settlers were following behind, and whose government increasingly believed the continent itself was America's destiny.

The Lakota. This created an entirely new problem. They had spent generations learning how to deal with indigenous rivals, European traders, and competing empires. They had learned how to turn trade into power. They had learned how to play 1 great power against another, and they had become one of the dominant powers of the Great Plains. But now those rival powers were disappearing, and the United States no longer had to worry about Britain, France, or Spain.

Using the indigenous peoples of the interior to contain its expansion. The Americans had survived the War of 1812, and they were about to turn their attention W once again. The question was no longer whether the United States could reach the Lakota. The question was whether the Lakota could continue to control the enormous world they had built around themselves. Because the next 40 years would transform the Great Plains forever. American traders would become American settlers, American trading posts would become forts, forts would become towns, and the trails crossing the plains would become roads, then wagon routes, and eventually railways. The Lakota had spent generations building a state of their own. Now they were about to discover what happens when their states stood directly in the path of a nation intended on building an empire.

The age of competing European empires was ending, the age of American expansion it was beginning, and the Lakota were about to face their greatest challenge yet. 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.