Agriculture on the precontact Great Plains describes the agriculture of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains of the United States and southern Canada in the Pre-Columbian era and before extensive contact with European explorers, which in most areas occurred by 1750. The principal crops grown by Indian farmers were maize (corn), beans, and squash, including pumpkins. Sunflowers, goosefoot, tobacco, gourds, and plums, were also grown.
Evidence of agriculture is found in all Central Plains complexes. Archaeological sites in Nebraska reveal cultivated crops such as little barley (Hordeum pusillum), sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), marsh elder (Iva annua), and maize (Zea mays). Tribes periodically switched from farming to hunting throughout their history during the Plains Village period, AD 950–1850.
Environment
The primary constraint on agriculture on the Great Plains is that precipitation is often deficient for growing maize, the primary crop of Indian farmers. In addition, on the northern Great Plains the growing season is short. Agriculture on the Plains seems to have had an ebb and flow, advancing westward into the drier areas in favorable wet periods and retreating in drier periods. The periodic abundance or scarcity of bison was also a factor in human settlements on the plains. The animal was an important food resource for Plains people, as well as providing skins for clothing and shelters.
Precontact
Gathering wild plants, such as the prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum, syn. Psoralea esculenta) and chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) for food was undoubtedly a practice of Indian societies on the Great Plains since their earliest habitation 13,000 or more years ago. Over time Plains people learned to grow or facilitate the growth of native plants useful as food. Many native plants cultivated by Indians in the Eastern Agricultural Complex were also cultivated on the Great Plains.
Squash and beans were cultivated in what is now the United States, independent of Mesoamerica. Maize is a tropical crop first cultivated in Mexico several thousand years ago, which found its way northward to what is now the United States more than one thousand years ago. Maize agriculture began on the Great Plains by AD 900, initiating the Southern Plains villagers period of western Oklahoma and Texas. It probably came about as an extension westward and northward of the Caddoan cultures of eastern Texas. The Plains Village culture consisted of hamlets and semi-permanent villages along major rivers such as the Red, Washita, and Canadian. Subsistence was a combination of agriculture and hunting. A drying climatic trend beginning AD 1000 or 1100 may have tipped the subsistence scale more toward hunting and less toward a dependence upon agriculture. The Antelope Creek Phase of Plains villagers, dated from AD 1200 to 1450 in the Texas panhandle was influenced by the Southwestern Pueblo people of the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico. The contemporaneous Apishapa culture of southeastern Colorado depended mostly upon hunting. The historic descendants of the Southern Plains villagers are possibly the Wichita and Pawnee Indians.
The earliest known dates for maize agriculture on the northern Great Plains are from AD 1000 to 1200. The Missouri River Valley in present-day North Dakota was probably the northern limit of pre-historic maize cultivation on the Great Plains. Prehistoric evidence of maize cultivation north of the border of the United States and Canada on the Great Plains is lacking but by the 1790s maize was being grown by Indian farmers as far north as the mouth of the Red River north of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The principal known Indian peoples who farmed extensively on the Great Plains when first discovered by European explorers were, from south to north, Caddoans in the Red River drainage, Wichita people along the Arkansas River, Pawnee in the Kansas River and Platte River drainages, and the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa along the Missouri River in the Dakotas. Other peoples migrated or were pushed westward onto the Great Plains in late prehistoric or proto-historic times. Some of them, such as the Sioux and Cheyenne, gave up agriculture to become nomadic; other such as the Dhegiha (the Osage, Kaw, Omaha, and Ponca) and the Chiwere (Otoe, Iowa, and Missouria) continued to farm while also hunting buffalo for a major part of their livelihood.