In the collection of this material I had for years the assistance and coöperation of the late Major Frank North, who always placed at my disposal his great store of Pawnee lore. Luther H. North, his brother, has given me a vast deal of assistance, and last spring accompanied me to the Pawnee reservation. Without his aid this book would never have been written. Mr. John B. Dunbar has been most kind in reading over the chapter on the Pawnees, and has aided me with many suggestions, besides giving me help on certain linguistic points.
Nothing is said in this volume about the Pawnee language—a subject which is sufficiently important to deserve a volume by itself.
To every intelligent student of North American aborigines it must be a matter of keen regret that nothing is known of the language of this people. That a distinct linguistic stock like the Pawnee should pass away unrecorded would be a serious misfortune, and the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution ought certainly to take some steps to preserve a record of the Pawnee language.
Major Frank North was undoubtedly more conversant with the spoken Pawnee tongue than any other white man has ever been. Since his death, there is no one who is so familiar with the language as Mr. John B. Dunbar, who has devoted much time to its study, and has made himself acquainted not only with its vocabulary, but also with its grammar. Born and reared among the Pawnees, familiar with them until early manhood, a frequent visitor to the tribe in later years, he is well fitted by interest and association to undertake the task of recording in permanent form the unwritten speech of this people. Add to this a long training as a student of language and history and a keen logical mind, and we have in Mr. Dunbar the man more than all others best fitted to undertake this difficult but most delightful task. The Director of the Bureau of Ethnology could not easily perform a greater service to aboriginal linguistics than to intrust to Mr. Dunbar the labor of preparing an extended work on the Pawnee language.
THE PAWNEES.
I. RELATIONSHIPS.
UNTIL within a few years the home of the Pawnees was in southern Nebraska and northern Kansas. This group of tribes may be called the main stock of the family; from them it took its name; they are its best and longest known members. In the earlier accounts of this people, the Pawnee Picts or Wichitas are often confounded with their more northern relatives.
The Pawnees proper consisted at one time of three bands or tribes, federated under a single head chief. These bands, in the order of their importance, were: The Chau-i, the Kit-ke-hahk´-i and the Pita-hau-erat. To these three was subsequently added—after the northern migration of the tribes, and their settlement in northern Kansas and Nebraska, but probably long anterior to the advent of the whites, and by conquest—the large, powerful and intelligent allied tribe, known as the Skidi or Pawnee Loups. These four have always been known in the writings of the earlier explorers in the West as respectively the Grand, the Republican, the Tapage and the Wolf Pawnees, and they constituted the Pawnee Nation.