Pawnee

01Summary

Earth-lodge farmers and seasonal buffalo hunters whose villages dotted the lower Platte. The trail crossed the heart of their hunting grounds, and many Pawnee bands traded with emigrants and later scouted for the U.S. Army against the Lakota. Smallpox and Lakota raids together cut their population by more than three-quarters in the trail era.

02History

The Pawnee, Chaticks-si-Chaticks, 'Men of Men', lived in four bands (Skidi, Chaui, Kitkehaki, Pitahawirata) along the Loup, Platte, and Republican rivers in present-day Nebraska. Their year alternated between earth-lodge village farming, maize, beans, and squash, in spring and autumn, and tipi-based bison hunts on the high plains in summer and winter.

Pawnee territory sat directly across the eastern half of the Oregon Trail. Most encounters with emigrant trains were trade. Pawnee men exchanged buffalo robes, dried meat, and information for sugar, coffee, cloth, and metal goods. Emigrant diaries describe the Pawnee as 'extremely fine looking people', in Edwin Bryant's words from 1846, who 'traded with us very honestly'.

Smallpox in 1838 and 1849 killed an estimated quarter of the Pawnee in each wave. Constant Lakota raids, driven partly by the trail's pressure on the buffalo herds, cut their territory and population further. By 1875 only 2,400 Pawnee remained, and that year the U.S. removed them to a reservation in Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma.

Pawnee scouts, recruited starting in 1864 under Frank North, served the U.S. Army through the Plains Wars of the 1870s and were considered some of the most effective irregular cavalry in U.S. service.

03Notable leaders

• Pitalesharo (Chief of Men)
  Skidi Pawnee leader, c. 1797-1832, who in 1817 famously rescued a captive Comanche girl from ritual sacrifice.
• Petalesharo II
  Chaui Pawnee chief who signed the 1857 treaty ceding most Pawnee land to the U.S.

04Today