ABSTRACT
GREAT PLAINS INDIANS The Great Plains is a vast region, stretching from Canada’s Upper Saskatchewan River south into the Texas Panhandle. The Rocky Mountains form a natural western boundary, with expansive prairie lands extending east into portions of Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. Within the Great Plains region today live a large number of Native American groups, such as the Dakota, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Sioux, and Comanche, whose languages and traditions vary enormously but all of whom have often been linked in the American popular imagination with the pioneer experience of buffalo hunting and Indian wars. A commonality within the region is the Native American horse culture, revolving around the herding and breeding of horses, thought to derive from the seventeenth-century introduction of horses by the Spanish.
