In like manner the Hidatsa are known to have flowed northwestward
many scores of miles; and the Asiniboin swept more rapidly across the
plains from the place of their rebellion against the Yanktonnai, on the
Mississippi, before they found final resting place on the Saskatchewan
plains 500 or 800 miles away. All of the movements were consistent and,
despite intertribal friction and strife, measurably harmonious. The lines
of movement, so far as they can be restored, are in full accord with the
lines of linguistic evolution traced by Hale and Dorsey and Gatschet, and
indicate that some five hundred or possibly one thousand years ago the
tribesmen pushed over the Appalachians to the Ohio and followed that
stream and its tributaries to the Mississippi (though there are faint
indications that some of the early emigrants ascended the northern
tributaries to the region of the Great Lakes); and that the human flood
gained volume as it advanced and expanded to cover the entire region of
the plains. The records concerning the movement of this great human stream
find support in the manifest reason for the movement; the reason was the
food quest by which all primitive men are led, and its end was the
abundant fauna of the prairieland, with the buffalo at its head.
While the early population of the Siouan stock, when first the huntsmen
crossed the Appalachians, may not be known, the lines of migration
indicate that the people increased and multiplied amain during their long
journey, and that their numbers culminated, despite external conflict and
internal strife, about the beginning of written history, when the Siouan
population may have been 100,000 or more.
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