How Native Americans Survived -40° Winters on the Plains

Subscribe:    / @thebigwhyhistory   Next video:    • The Winter Cowboys Feared Most: Life on th...   How did the Lakota, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara get through winters that could drop below minus forty? Horses kept inside earth lodges and fed cottonwood bark. Tipis with liners that worked as a chimney and an insulated wall at the same time. Corn hidden in bell-shaped cache pits. Bison hunts on snowshoes. And a calendar with no numbers that historians still line up with the Leonid meteor storm of 1833. Practices varied a lot from Nation to Nation, and these Nations are still here today. If your family kept a winter count, what picture would you draw for this year? Tell me in the comments. 📚 Sources Lewis & Clark Journals (UNL), Dec. 17, 1804: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu... Lewis & Clark Journals, Feb. 12, 1805: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu... NPS, Knife River – The Earthlodge: https://www.nps.gov/knri/learn/histor... NPS – The Business of Bison: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/beol... G. L. Wilson, Waheenee (Buffalo Bird Woman, 1921): https://gutenberg.org/files/67133/671... WyoHistory – The Winter the Horses Starved: https://www.wyohistory.org/encycloped... SHSND – Tipi Technology: https://blog.statemuseum.nd.gov/blog/... SHSND – Fort Clark: https://history.nd.gov/historicsites/... Encyclopedia of the Great Plains – Tipis: https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/ency... Four Lakota Values: https://www.stjo.org/native-american-... ICT News – Lakota winter stories: https://ictnews.org/?p=324312 ND Studies – Smallpox of 1837: https://www.ndstudies.gov/gr8/node/283 MHA Nation – History: https://mhanation.com/history Mallery, Picture-Writing of the American Indians (1893): https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5465... DOI Indian Arts and Crafts Board – Battiste Good: https://www.doi.gov/iacb/TreasuresBat... Buffalo Bill Center – Lone Dog's Winter Count: https://centerofthewest.org/2015/12/0... Hornaday, The Extermination of the American Bison: https://scholarlypress.si.edu/store/h... Montana Historical Society, ch. 11: https://mhs.mt.gov/education/Textbook... InterTribal Buffalo Council: https://itbcbison.com 🖼️ Historical images (public domain) George Catlin paintings: Smithsonian American Art Museum. Karl Bodmer prints, Edward S. Curtis photographs and Hornaday's 1889 bison map: Library of Congress. Lone Dog's and Battiste Good's winter counts: Garrick Mallery, Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology. Earthlodge and bison photos: NPS. 🎬 Video scenes are AI-generated historical reconstructions for illustration, not footage of real people or events. The paintings, photographs and maps credited above are authentic. 🎵 Music: "The Long Dark" by Scott Buckley – released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au #NativeAmericanHistory #GreatPlains #BigWhy