Massacre Canyon: The Last Battle

On August fifth, eighteen seventy-three, a Pawnee hunting party was moving through a dry canyon in what is now Hitchcock County in southwestern Nebraska. They were on their summer buffalo hunt, one of the last. About four hundred people had left their reservation near Genoa, Nebraska, men, women, and children, traveling west into the Republican River country where bison still grazed in meaningful numbers.

Waiting in the canyon above them were more than one thousand Oglala and Brulé Lakota warriors. The Pawnee had not seen them. The Lakota attacked from the canyon rim.

When it was over, the death toll among the Pawnee stood at a minimum of sixty-nine, and some estimates reach twice that number. The majority of those killed were women and children. The Lakota losses were far smaller. The battle, if it can be called that, was closer to an ambush with overwhelming force.

Massacre Canyon is documented as the last large intertribal battle in American history. The Pawnee and Lakota had been competing over the same diminishing buffalo ranges for decades, each tribe itself already under enormous pressure from American expansion onto the plains.

The aftermath moved quickly. The Pawnee returned to their Nebraska reservation, but three years later, in eighteen seventy-six, the federal government sold off their Nebraska lands to incoming settlers. The proceeds funded a new reservation in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. The Pawnee were relocated there. They have been in Oklahoma ever since.

Historians have debated how much weight to give the battle itself as a cause of removal versus the broader federal policy of clearing the plains for homesteaders. The honest answer is that both forces were operating simultaneously. The battle took away something that was already being taken.