Originating in the northern basin of the Missouri River, the Kiowa migrated south to the Black Hills around 1650, living there peacefully with the Crow Indians. At that time they were organized in 10 independent bands and numbered an estimated 3,000.

Pushed southward by the invading Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux, who were being pushed out of their lands in the great lake regions by the Objiwe tribes, the Kiowa moved down the Platte River basin headwaters of the Arkansas, Cimarron, Canadian, and Red Rivers.

There they fought with the Comanche, who already occupied the land. The Spanish in Santa Fe mediated a peace treaty between the Kiowa and Comanche in 1807 and the two groups made an alliance and agreed to share the area. An additional group, the Plains Apache (also called Kiowa-Apache), also affiliated with the Kiowa the peoples hunted, traveled, and made war together. The two tribes soon began to raid settlements in Texas and New Mexico, which provided them with horses and mules to trade with the northern Plains tribes.

The Kiowa lived a typical Plains Indian lifestyle. Mostly nomadic, they survived on buffalo meat and gathered vegetables, living in teepees, and depended on their horses for hunting and military uses. The historic Kiowa also ranged through southwest Colorado and southwest Kansas. 

After 1840 the Kiowa joined forces with their former enemies, the Cheyenne, as well as the Comanche and the Apache, to fight and raid the Eastern natives then moving into the Indian Territory. The United States military intervened, and in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge of 1867 the Kiowa agreed to settle on a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. Because reservation restricted them between the Washita and Red Rivers, they never really confined their activities to the reservation, however, and in 1874 resumed warfare with the white settlers in the vicinity. Primarily living in Palo Duro Canyon, near what is now Amarillo, Texas , the renegade bands were defeated when large numbers of their horses were taken and destroyed, and several of their leaders were captured.