When the Pawnees came into the northern country they found it occupied by the Poncas, the Omahas and the Otoes. According to their custom, they attacked these tribes, and, after a resistance more or less prolonged, conquered them. The Poncas appear to have made the most stubborn fight against the invaders, and it is related that they made an alliance with the Sioux against their common enemy. From time to time there would be a cessation of hostilities, and peace would be made, but this never endured long.
There still exists among the Pawnees a triumph song, composed after a treacherous attack on the Pawnees by the Poncas during a time of peace. Mr. Dunbar’s remarks on this song are so interesting that I quote them in full. He says, “The Pawnee has a song, constituting the finest satirical production in the language, relating to an attempt that the Poncas are said to have once made to recover their independence. Their warriors in a body, so the account states, made a pretended visit of peace to the village of Chau-i, at that time the head band of the Pawnees. After lulling to rest, as they supposed, the suspicions of the Chau-i, according to a preconcerted plan, they made an attack on them, but were signally discomfited. In commemoration of the victory then achieved, the Pawnees composed this song, and the presumption is that such a remarkable production would not have originated and maintained its position permanently in their minds without a good historic basis.” This is the song:
A, Li-hit! Ku´s-ke-har-u, Kŭr-ŭ-u-ras,
Aha, you Ponca! It was (pretended) peace. Did you find
id-i, tŭs-ku-ra-wŭsk-u? Laŭ-i-lŭk-u-ru-tŭs.
What you were laughing at me about? You meant fight.
“The keen satire of the interrogation is exquisite. It conceives of the Poncas as quietly laughing in their sleeves, during their ostensibly amicable visit, in anticipation of the summary retribution that they expected to inflict upon their oppressors.”
At last the Poncas, Omahas and Otoes were effectively subjugated, and were permitted to live on the borders of the Pawnee territory, and under the quasi-protection of that tribe.
In the old days before the coming of the whites the Pawnees had no enemies near at hand. They had conquered all surrounding nations, and claimed and held the country from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Niobrara, south to the Arkansas River or to the Canadian. Then, when they wished to go to war, they were forced to journey either to the Rocky Mountains to fight the Utes, or up the Missouri to attack the Crows, or down into Mexico to plunder the Spaniards, or into Texas to steal horses from the Comanches, the Wichitas and other southern tribes. Then the war parties were great bodies—sometimes one thousand men—and all on foot. Afterward, as settlements approached them and other tribes were driven into their country, and the different Pawnee bands were crowded together, their campaigns diminished in importance, the war parties became smaller and smaller, until at last only half a dozen men would start out, and sometimes a single individual would go off by himself to steal horses.
The Pawnees were true Ishmaelites. They had no friends upon the prairies save those whom they had conquered and held by fear. Foes swarmed about them. To the north were the different bands of the Dakotas and the Crows; to the west the Utes, with the Arapahoes, the Kiowas and the Cheyennes; and to the south the Comanches, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Kansas, Osages, and their relations the Wichitas. With these last they were long at war; for the Pawnees and Wichitas had forgotten each other’s existence, or rather each tribe was wholly ignorant as to what had become of the other. Only a tradition of the old relationship still remained. The kinship was rediscovered within the last thirty years, when some Kaws came north on a visit to the Pawnee village, and brought with them a Wichita, who had been visiting at the Kaw agency. The Pawnees found that this man spoke a language nearly like their own, and at length discovered that the Wichitas were a part of their own people. Attempts were made to establish a peace, and to renew their old friendly relations, but the fact that the Wichitas were so closely allied to the Comanches, Kiowas and Cheyennes made it very difficult for the tribes to come together on a friendly footing. Hostilities still continued therefore, nor was a lasting peace made until the visit of Wi-ti-ti le-shar´-uspi, already described.
As a result of this well nigh universal hostility, the Pawnees were constantly being attacked, and were constantly losing men, women and children. Mr. Dunbar, who has taken pains to collect some facts bearing on this point, says:
“Probably, not a year in this century has been without losses from this source (warfare), though only occasionally have they been marked with considerable disasters. In 1832 the Skidi band suffered a severe defeat on the Arkansas from the Comanches. In 1847 a Dakota war party, numbering over seven hundred, attacked a village occupied by two hundred and sixteen Pawnees, and succeeded in killing eighty-three. In 1854 a party of one hundred and thirteen were cut off by an overwhelming body of Cheyennes and Kiowas, and killed almost to a man. In 1873 a hunting party of about four hundred, two hundred and thirteen of whom were men, on the Republican, while in the act of killing a herd of buffalo, were attacked by nearly six hundred Dakota warriors, and eighty-six were killed. But the usual policy of their enemies has been to cut off individual or small scattered parties, while engaged in the chase or in tilling isolated corn patches. Losses of this kind, trifling when taken singly, have in the aggregate borne heavily on the tribe. It would seem that such losses, annually recurring, should have taught them to be more on their guard. But let it be remembered that the struggle has not been in one direction against one enemy. The Dakotas, Crows, Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Comanches, Osages and Kansas have faithfully aided each other, though undesignedly in the main, in this crusade of extermination against the Pawnee. It has been in the most emphatic sense, a struggle of the one against the many. With the possible exception of the Dakotas, there is much reason to believe that the animosity of these tribes has been exacerbated by the galling tradition of disastrous defeats which Pawnee prowess had inflicted upon themselves in past generations. To them the last seventy years have been a carnival of revenge.”
Mr. Dunbar regards the constant warfare against their many enemies as one principal cause of the rapid diminution in numbers of the Pawnees, and, no doubt, it was a cause; but a far more important one was the sapping of the tribe’s vitality by contact with the whites. Their villages lay almost directly in the path of trans-continental emigration, and it was the introduction of spirits and the special diseases contracted from the whites which weakened the tribe, and made the tough and sinewy Pawnee a ready prey to sickness and death.