Why did every Pawnee earth lodge open to the east? Because the bundles were opened facing the rising sun, and because the Morning Star, the great light that climbs the sky before dawn, was the power that had brought the corn, the people and the world itself out of the dark. A man who built his doorway facing west was telling his neighbors something about himself, and they would not like what it said.
Around 1800 the four Pawnee bands, the Chaui, Kitkehahki, Pitahawirata and Skidi, lived in towns of earth lodges on the terraces of the Loup, the Platte and the Republican, in what is now Nebraska and Kansas. They planted corn, beans and squash in the bottomlands, rode out twice a year to hunt bison on the high plains, and read the night sky closely enough to time the planting and the great ceremonies by it.
Pressure came from every direction: Spanish and French traders, smallpox, settlers, and a long war with the Lakota that reached its worst in 1873, when a Pawnee hunting party was massacred near the Republican River. Through the 1860s and 1870s Pawnee men rode as scouts for the U.S. Army, and in 1874 and 1875 the nation was removed to Indian Territory, carrying its bundles south.
The scouts' service did not end there. In 1876, with their families already in Indian Territory, a company of Pawnee scouts rode north for the Army one more time.
