Chapter One Indigenous Fortifications Archaeologists investigating an ancient Indigenous village on the east bank of the Missouri River in central South Dakota in 1978 made a shocking discovery: a mass grave containing the remains of at least 486 men, women, and children who had suffered a violent death. Their scalped, mutilated, decapitated, and dismembered bodies filled the village''s defensive ditch with bones piled 3 feet deep. How had these inhabitants of the area met their doom, which archaeologists determined occurred sometime around 1325 ad? Other archaeological evidence at the site painted a grisly picture of the story behind the murders. Around 1100 AD a Native village thrived along the Missouri River at a site now located within the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in present-day South Dakota. Streams to the south and west provided a steady water supply for this farming village, and its population grew over the decades. Changes occurred around 1300 as climatic forces and other factors caused food shortages and starvation. The famine led to conflict between the Crow Creek village and similar communities along the Missouri. At some point before the massacre, the inhabitants of Crow Creek began to build defensive fortifications around their village.

They used the natural defenses provided by the creeks to the south and west and began to fortify the north side of the village. Their defenses featured both inner and outer palisades. The inner walls were fronted by a defensive ditch 1,250 feet long, varying from 15 to 50 feet wide and 6 to 12 feet deep. After experiencing an extended period of peace and expansion, Middle Missouri residents at Crow Creek found it necessary to build a second, much larger defensive system around their expanded village, with twelve bastions on the outer stockade and a new ditch 12 feet wide and 6 feet deep. Evidence suggests that attackers breached the defenses and massacred the villagers, possibly while they tried to augment their fortifications. The invaders burned the homes, granaries, and other structures, filling one of the fortification ditches with the scalped, mutilated, and dismembered bodies of their victims. The practice of mutilating enemy bodies stemmed from the notion that if one met these same enemies in the next life, they would lack their sight, hearing, reproductive organs, arms, and so forth, rendering them defenseless and incapable of doing one harm. The Crow Creek Massacre reveals that the elaborate defenses sometimes constructed by the Indigenous inhabitants of the Great Plains did not always successfully ward off enemy attacks from without or resolve the vulnerabilities of internal revolt.

Although an extreme example, the Crow Creek Massacre highlights the dangers Great Plains peoples faced and the scale of the combat and destruction that could take place. In this chapter, we explore the fortifications constructed by the Indigenous peoples who lived on the Great Plains to protect themselves from a fate like that of the Crow Creek village. We begin by considering the evolving conditions on the plains that led to distinct types of fortifications. We describe Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Wichita defenses on the eastern plains and offer examples of defensive sites and refuge strongholds on the western high plains.