The Pawnee and the Loup River World

Somewhere along here, the land used to belong to a nation that had farmed it for centuries. The Pawnee called themselves Chaticks si chaticks, meaning men of men, and along the Loup River, which feeds into the Platte not far to the east, they built one of the most enduring civilizations in the central plains.

Their villages were not scattered camps. They were structured communities of earthlodges, round dome-shaped structures framed in cottonwood and covered with sod, each one large enough to house an extended family of thirty or forty people, with room for horses in winter. A single Pawnee village along the Loup might hold dozens of these lodges, arranged in patterns along the river bluffs, oriented toward the sky in ways that reflected deep astronomical knowledge. The Pawnee tracked the stars with precision. Their ceremonies mapped the movements of Venus, Jupiter, and the Pleiades.

By the middle of the eighteen hundreds, the Pawnee numbered only a few thousand people, down from perhaps twelve thousand in the eighteen thirties, reduced by smallpox epidemics and raids by the better-armed Sioux to the north. They nonetheless retained their territory. And, unusually, they chose a complicated alliance with the United States Army. The Pawnee Scouts, formally organized in eighteen sixty-four, served as a fighting unit alongside U.S. forces in the very campaigns that were shrinking Native territory across the region.

It was not enough. In eighteen seventy-five and eighteen seventy-six, the United States government pressured the Pawnee to cede their Nebraska homeland and relocate to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The last Pawnee families left the Loup River valley in eighteen seventy-six. Their ancient village sites are still visible along the river. Low mounded depressions in the grass, facing the sky they once charted so carefully.