Dana Kadlec
HIST351
Exam 1: Take home portion

Native American women both improved their lives and acted as agents for change that helped end traditional Plains Indian ways of life in several different ways. Native American women began to be an essential part of the fur trade as “intertribal go-betweens”. They were able to make trades more civil among tribes and Euro-Americans. Women would use their labor and sexuality to ensure goods and relations with outsiders. For example, when John Bradbury was journeying up the Missouri, he stopped through the Arikara village and was always accompanied by an Ariakarn woman who would examine his dress, repair moccasins, and generally this offer was “accompanied by a bedfellow.” While women gained power with the profit from their necessary assistance, they began to see the advantages of interlacing with Euro-American men’s lives. They began a necessity for Euro-American’s, and whether or not the men actually fell in love, they proceeded to have interracial marriages that would benefit both partners. For the women, they were attracted to the men’s technological advances as well as being better dressed, cared for, and fed. This all was subjected to how wealthy the man was, and how high in the hierarchy the woman was. It became so essential to the fur trade system that Indian men were beginning to question if the white men had women of their own. For some white men, polygamy was favorable but that also depended on the amount of money that man had to care for not only one, but multiple families. Indian men also began to see that their women only wanted the Euro-American men for their wealth, and while some of those cases are true, there were many instances where the marriage lasted until death. So while the Native American wives lives gained improvement, it also challenged keeping their traditional Plains Indian life. In one