[4] As of 2007, the total number of remaining native speakers was reported as ten,[5] one of whom, Maude Starr, died on 20 January 2010.

An Arikara village, near where present-day Pierre, South Dakota developed, was visited in 1743 by two sons of the French trader and explorer La Vérendrye.

[11] The surplus corn and other crops, along with tobacco, were traded to the Lakota, the Cheyenne and more southern plains tribes during short-lived truces.

The travois were used to carry meat harvested during the seasonal hunts; a single dog could pull a quarter of a bison.

[14] The Arikara played a central role in the Great Plains Indian trading networks based on an advantageous geographical position combined with a surplus from agriculture and craft.

Historical sources show that the Arikara villages were visited by Cree, Assiniboine, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Kiowa, Plains Apache and Comanche.

This is an "emergence" style creation myth, depicting the "Corn Mother" as giving birth to the planted seeds (the remaining good giants after the flood).

[16] In the late 18th century, the tribe suffered a high rate of fatalities from smallpox epidemics, which reduced their population from an estimated 30,000 to 6,000, disrupting their social structure.

In a burned-down village, (later studied as Larson Site), archaeologists found the mutilated skeletons of 71 men, women and children, killed in the early 1780s by unknown Native American attackers.

[20] The Arikara faced many challenges during the first quarter of the 19th century: Reduced numbers, competition from white traders, and military pressure from the Lakota and other groups of Sioux.

[21] Due to their reduced numbers, the Arikara started to live closer to the Mandan and Hidatsa in the same area for mutual protection.

[5] The first Arikara delegation left for the capital, Washington, DC, in April 1805, urged by the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The trappers were camped near an Arikara village at the mouth of Grand River (north of present-day Mobridge, South Dakota).

The Arikara escaped at night, and angry fur traders set their empty lodges ablaze the next morning.

"A hand-written notation made on the credit side of Menard's account book page states, 'Killed by the Rees near Fort Cass Spring 1833,'" Landry wrote in his article.

The manager in the trading post Fort Clark observed in June 1838, how "the Rees, Mandans and Gros Ventres [Hidatsas] started out early" in a common bison hunt.

[32] The goal of the United States in the Laramie Treaty of 1851 was to establish a permanent peace on most of the northern plains and to define tribal territories.

[38] Like a Fishhook Village was not safe from devastation, strikes or raids for horses (and neither was the nearby trading post Fort Berthold II).

[41] In 1869, the Three Tribes asked the United States for guns as protection against hostile Sioux, and they finally received 300 pieces.

[42] The Three Tribes sold a part of their southern treaty land, more or less already annexed by the Lakota, to the United States on April 12, 1870.

[43][44] In June 1874, Colonel George Armstrong Custer in Fort Abraham Lincoln (now North Dakota) received an order to delay his Black Hills Expedition and stop a large war party of Lakota on its way to attack Like a Fishhook Village.

The Arikara "supplied some of the most faithful and effective Indian scouts" for the Army during the war against the bands of Lakota roaming other peoples' territories in 1876-1877.

[47] "For tribes subject to Sioux pressure for decades, the combination of revenge and self-defense would constitute a powerful motivation" for joining the whites in actions like that.

[48] Custer's favorite scout, an Arikara known as Bloody Knife, fell during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Crow Indian Reservation (now Montana) in 1876.

[49] "Mandans, Arickarees and Gros Ventres" were among the first Indian children to arrive at Hampton Institute, a historically black college, in Virginia for schooling, in 1878.