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The Travois
At a Glance:
What it is: A frame of two long wooden poles, lashed into an elongated triangle, dragged behind a dog or horse to haul loads over land. The word comes from the French travail, meaning "to work."
Nations associated: Plains nations including the Lakota (who called it hupak'in), Ojibwe (niswaakodaabaan), Siksika (Blackfoot), Assiniboine, Cheyenne, Salish, and Crow
Materials: Wooden poles (aspen, cottonwood, willow), buffalo sinew lashings, rawhide, leather harnessing, sometimes stretched hide or netting
Time depth: Dog travois in the pre-colonial era; horse travois after horses were introduced to North America in the 16th century; in regular use until the late 1800s
Key innovation: The horse-era travois was often built from the tipi poles themselves — the same poles that held up a family's lodge hauled its belongings between camps
Design and Construction
The basic travois is a study in elegant simplicity: two long wooden poles lashed together at the front to form an elongated triangle (or A-frame), with a basket or platform suspended between the poles toward the dragging end. The frame was attached to the animal's shoulders with a leather harness and dragged with the pointed end forw
ard. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the load platform — secured with sinew — carried household baggage, firewood, parfleches packed with bison meat, and the tipi cover itself. Designs varied from nation to nation: the Assiniboine used a circular, webbed
platform, while the Siksika (Blackfoot) built platforms that were both circular and rectangular. The dog travois of the pre-colonial era was the smaller, original form. Historical accounts describe poles of aspen or cottonwood, notched and lashed together at one end with buffalo sinew. Cross-bars were tied between the poles near the splayed ends, and the apex of the A — wrapped in buffalo skin to prevent friction burns — rested on the dog's shoulders while the
ends dragged along the ground. A dog travois could pull no more than 20 to 30 kilograms.
The Dog Era
Before horses arrived, the dog was the only domesticated animal among Plains peoples, and dogs were the engine of camp life. A National Museum of the American Indian curator, Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), has noted that dogs were originally used as beasts of burden and that women — who built and packed the travois — worked alongside the dogs to move everything a family owned. T
he work of managing the dog teams fell to women, who trained the animals from puppyhood — reportedly even using small toy travois to get puppies accustomed to the frame. Typical loads were practical: bison meat from the hunt, firewood, and the family's lodge materials. Some tribes relocated as far as 200 miles between seasonal camps.
The Horse Era
When horses reached the Plains — spreading north from the Spanish colonial frontier in the 1500s and 1600s — the travois scaled up with them. As the Canadian Encyclopedia puts it, the horse's greater pulling power allowed tipis to increase in size and household goods to multiply, and horses could travel longer distances through the prairie heat than dogs could
. The horse travois carried an ingenious piece of dual-purpose engineering. Rather than building a special-purpose sled, many nations simply crossed a pair of tipi poles across the horse's back and tied a burden platform between the poles behind the animal. The horse then hauled both the tipi's frame and the family's baggage in a single trip. Children and elders often rode on the platform between the poles. Among the Salish, it was traditional when moving on to leave the tipi poles behind at the old camp for the next family to use — a quiet act of hospitality toward whoever camped there next.
Life on the Move
The travois was more than a cargo frame; it was woven into daily life. Blackfoot women lashed dog travois together, front ends raised, to form a curved fence for holding driven game until hunters could take the animals. When a tipi was raised, a horse travois leaned against a lodge pole served as a ladder, letting women pin the upper edges of the lodge cover in place.
The travois literally left its mark on the land. Deeply worn parallel tracks from generations of dragged poles can still be seen in places — among them the stretch of trail known as the Lewis and Clark Trail-Travois Road and at Montana's Lewis and Clark Pass, as well as at the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in North Dakota.
Legacy
With mechanized transportation and the end of the traditional hunting life on the prairies in the late 1800s, the travois lost its everyday purpose — but not its place in memory. Some hunting parties in rural areas still use travois to move meat and equipment, and the frames appear in heritage centers, museums, and cultural centers. The National Museum of the American Indian displayed a 19th-century Cheyenne travois, made of wood, pigment, and hide, in its "A Song for the Horse Nation" exhibition — a reminder that this simple frame of lashed poles carried not just goods, but entire ways of life across the Plains for generations.
Learn More & Resources
- The Canadian Encyclopedia: "Travois" — https://development.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/travois
- Smithsonian: "A Song for the Horse Nation Gallops into Washington" — https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/song-horse-nation-gallops-washington
- Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum: "Imataa Manistsi: Blackfoot Dog Travois" (PDF) — http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/attachments/028_Imataa%20Manistsi-%20Blackfoot%20Dog%20Travois.pdf
- Wikipedia: "Travois" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travois
References & Sources
1. Gadacz, René R. "Travois." The Canadian Encyclopedia, published Feb. 7, 2006, last edited Mar. 8, 2021.
2. "Travois." Wikipedia (citing The Canadian Encyclopedia, Native Languages of the Americas, and historical ethnographic sources).
3. Smithsonian Institution. "'A Song for the Horse Nation' Gallops into Washington." News release, Oct. 2011.
4. "Imataa Manistsi: Blackfoot Dog Travois." Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (Blackfoot Shirts project).
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