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The Lakota people were originally a nomadic/warrior society. They sustained themselves through hunting buffalo, and raiding neighboring peoples. The first major effect the Europeans had on the Lakota happened with the introduction of the horse and the gun. The horse and the gun made nomadic life just that much more viable for these people, it gave them greater mobility, which, in turn helped them become even more adept at combat on the open terrain. Being nomadic, they never had permanent dwellings; they typically lived in tee-pees, or wigwams. Their territory (in par thanks to the introduction of the horse) covered a huge swath of land that sat in the middle of what the United States considered their territory. At first this land was considered useless to the United States. By the time of the Oregon trail, when this land had become of some interest to the United states, the natives of the plains (Lakota, among many others) had started rebounding from the old world epidemics that had wiped out over half of the native peoples living in North America. The Lakota had resumed their hunts, and raiding practices, some times on emigrants traveling through. Also, at the same time as this great emigration to the West, the civil wa