Pawnee

01Summary

Farmers and bison hunters who lived in earth-lodge villages along the Loup and other rivers of present-day Nebraska, and whose hunting grounds the wagon trains crossed. In the trail years the Pawnee lost most of their people to smallpox, cholera and war with the Lakota, and in the 1870s they moved to Indian Territory, today's Oklahoma.

02History

The Pawnee name for themselves is Chaticks si Chaticks, 'Men of Men.' For centuries they lived in large earth lodges along the Loup, Platte and Republican rivers, in four bands: the Skidi (Skiri), Chaui, Kitkahahki and Pitahawirata. They farmed corn, beans and squash near their villages and left twice a year on long bison hunts.

Emigrant trains began crossing Pawnee hunting grounds in the 1840s. The Pawnee had given up their land south of the Platte in an 1833 treaty but kept the right to hunt there, and in 1848 they sold the site of Fort Kearny to the United States for $2,000 in goods.

Meetings could be friendly. In 1843 a Pawnee band coming home from a bison hunt gave Peter Burnett's company a good supply of dried meat. They could also be tense. Guidebooks warned travelers to guard their stock in Pawnee country, and in 1846 Pawnee men killed an emigrant named Edward Trimble while he was out looking for lost cattle.

Disease and war hit the Pawnee hard. Smallpox and cholera, and constant fighting with the Lakota and Cheyenne who were pushing onto the plains, cut their numbers from about 12,000 in the 1830s to under 4,000 by 1860. In 1843 a Lakota war party burned about half the lodges of a Pawnee village near the Loup River and killed 68 people, and in 1873 more than 1,000 Lakota warriors attacked a Pawnee hunting party of about 350 men, women and children at Massacre Canyon.

By 1859 the Pawnee were confined to a small reservation on the Loup River. Many Pawnee men served as U.S. Army scouts from 1864 to 1877 against their old enemies. Worn down by hunger and raids, the nation asked in 1874 to move to Indian Territory, and most people had moved by 1875. By 1900 the census counted only 633 Pawnee.

03Notable leaders

• Petalesharo
  Skidi Pawnee leader, born around 1797, who probably died in the early 1830s, famous for rescuing a captive Comanche girl from a Morning Star sacrifice around 1817. He met President James Monroe in Washington in 1821.
• Sky Chief (Te-la-wa-hut-lai-sharu)
  Kitkahahki Pawnee chief, one of the first killed when the Lakota attacked at Massacre Canyon, Nebraska, in 1873.

04Today