Sahnish

The Sahnish, known to their neighbours as the Arikara or Ree, are a Caddoan-speaking Plains people; Arikara may mean horns, elk people or corn eaters. Linguists place their split from the Skidi Pawnee around the fifteenth century, after which they built fortified earth-lodge villages along the Missouri River in South Dakota. They farmed corn and hunted buffalo and were once estimated at thirty thousand people.

The smallpox epidemic of 1780 to 1782 cut their thirty-two Missouri villages to two and left them open to Sioux raids. The weakened Sahnish drifted north to live near the Mandan and Hidatsa; the Lewis and Clark Expedition met them in 1804.

Their 1823 clash with Ashley's trappers and Colonel Leavenworth's troops became the first United States Indian war west of the Missouri, ending in a peace treaty in 1825.