Traveling water forms a giant gyre of current encircling the Pacific Ocean while the air over it picks up water in clouds. Hurled at the American coast in a regular pulse, both water and air carry objects. Japanese scientists in wartime discovered this and sent fire bombs by air and by sea in an effort to set forest fires in the thick evergreen forests living off the water in the air. It wasn't very successful.
Tangled rafts of storm-ripped vegetation sometimes washed across the ocean with their inhabitants brought unwillingly along. The people in SE Asia were from cultures that lived on boats -- even their cats lived on boats -- and knew how to fish. Typhoons or indiscretion might have carried them to a new coast. There is evidence that they populated South America much earlier than the glacier-following humans. Some suggest 60,000 years ago. Structures on the edge would have been submerged when the sea level rose, and some evidence has been found just under water. The new investigations of the Native American genome have not moved quickly, partly for political reasons.
But so far the coming onshore of water-laden air, propelled by the ocean currents driven by the turning of the planet and the temperature differences through seasonal, saline content, and volcanic heating, has swept on across Oregon and Idaho to feed water -- finally -- to the East Slope of the Rockies. This, somewhat lessened by the scraping mountains, arrives as rain, snow and snowpack to feed the grass, the bison, and the streams that are pointed by gravity to the Mississippi Valley. This "tree" of streams was the first white access to the middle of the North American continent. Even after the Industrial Revolution, the steam-driven paddle wheelers plied their way upriver to Fort Benton.
It was not an easy trip. Debris and a shifting river bottom presented obstacles that could rip the bottom out of a boat. It was necessary to stop and cut more wood now and then. Resentful indigenous people set upon them. Since maps were barely begun, at first the navigators didn't know where the tributaries went.
The tribes most aware of this river system was at the head of the Mississippi: the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. These people were sedentary, not moving from their home village where they built wooden-beamed round earth houses, because they were able to raise good crops of corn, squash, and beans with fish for fertilizer. However, they were interested in the people who passed through and became good traders and sources of travel info.
This is where the Lewis and Clark expedition spent their first winter and was the source tribe for the original Kipp family that had such a major impact on recorded history. Denise Juneau, the first Montana state school superintendent, is Blackfeet on her father's side, but "Three Sisters" on her mother's side. These tribes were a "holding pond" of knowledge and skill, which is one of the advantages of sedentary cultures, but they also had the benefit of a steady flow of people going up and down the river.
The Siksika themselves were content with the annual gyre of their own, following the bison as they circled their feeding grounds. They were on foot, not particularly interested in boats except for bull boats, round hard-to-steer vessels made of a bison hide stretched over a willow wand framework. They were considered as being for women, useful for transport or shelter, which were women's doin's. Mainly there was no reason to go gallivanting off to unknown places when there was plenty of food and adventures where they were.
"Another early account comes from Saukamappe (a Cree later adopted into the Peigan), who was 75 years old when he recounted his early years to explorer David Thompson in the 1780s. French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye made it as far west as the upper Missouri River in 1738, and his sons were also explorers of the West. . .
"Anthony Henday of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) met a large Blackfoot group in 1754 in what is now Alberta. The Blackfoot (the Canadian version of Blackfeet) had established dealings with traders connected to the Canadian and English fur trade before meeting the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806. . .
"In 1833, German explorer Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and Swiss painter Karl Bodmer spent months with the Niitsitapi (the name for the Blackfeet in their own language) to get a sense of their culture. Bodmer portrayed their society in paintings and drawings." They came on the rivers, funded by Euro sources and carrying much gear, both as supplies and then as returning acquisitions.
(These three paragraphs come from Wikipedia. Go there for more info but be wary. Not everything is accurate since anyone can post.)
The People themselves object mostly to the idea of where they came from. Their thought is that they were always where they are. The major weather patterns of the planet Earth move so deliberately across the millennia that they seem permanent. What we feel is the round of seasons, which we accommodate with practices and ceremonies.
The major thunderstorms that break open Spring to make it Summer are the powerful source of key ceremonies among the Blackfeet. While torrents change riverways, lightning charges the land with nitrates, a vital fertilizer. A system of communal singing, fasting, dancing, and recounting supports a feeling of belonging to the land and surviving the violent dramas of the sky. Summertime, berry and camas time, was very busy.
In winter, which can go far below freezing, the people's practice was to spend a lot of time sleeping rolled up in bison robes in the lodges. Stories were assigned to this time, especially late in the season when food ran low. Many were meant for children to teach them their culture and how to survive. In order to give more food to children, adults might starve during this time. Much attention was given to being "out of one's mind" due to hardship or borderline food, maybe moldy or rotted or not normally eaten. But there were no alcohol or psychedelics Trees were vital in winter, offering shelter along the streams where water ran under the ice. Small groups formed "beads" along the rivers. No trees grew out on the open prairie where there was not enough water to sustain them.
When Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head took a GPS along the East Slope to make a map of the ancient trails and camping places, they used as their guide in part the distance people and dogs can go without water and then later the distance a horse can go without water. The water travels and where it goes, the People go.
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