Delawares and Pawnees

[chicheman]

The Delawares, one of the replaced tribes of eastern origin, soon came into contact with western tribes on the Plains, when settling in Missouri and and later in Kansas around 1830.

When the Delawares resided in Missouri, their hunters had become aquainted with the plains country, but when they settled in Kansas they went even farther west to pursue the buffaloe herds. As soon as they began to hunt in that part of their reserve called the outlet,
they ran into trouble with the Pawnee, a resident tribe angered by the appearance of strange Indians whose language and customs differed from their own. In an effort to repulse the strangers, the Pawnee organized war parties and ambushed the Delaware hunters. According to their custom, the Delawares were forced to retaliate to save their honor, and injury and death resulted on both sides., a repetition of the same kind of trouble the Delawares had experienced with the Osages in Missouri.
As an act of vengeance, Chief Anderson´s son, the war chief Captain Suwaunock led a party of Delaware warriors to the main Pawnee town on the Platte River in what is now Nebraska, and destroyed all the dwellings.
The United States sent commissioners to assuage the jealousies and bring the warring tribes together to halt hostilities. John Treat Irving, Jr., the twenty-year-old nephew of Washington Irving was present with Indian Commissioner Henry L. Ellsworth and others on November 12, 1833. when peace was concluded between the Pawnee on one side, and the Delawares and other tribes on the other.
In describing this conference, Irving wrote that the Delaware warriors were "glittering" with trinkets; their silver ornaments glistening in the sunshine, and their gay ribbands fluttering in the wind. They were a gaudy, effeminate-looking race, yet beneath all their frippery of dress lurked that indomitable courage, and thirst for glory, which not even intemperance, and their intercourse with the whites could destroy."
(Sounds like kind of typical prejudice of 19th Cent. white observers). Behind the warriors came Captain Suwaunock and the Delaware delegation took their seats opposite the Pawnee Chiefs and councilors, the members of both groups wearing grim expressions, all fearful of compromising their dignity as proud warriors. When it came to his turn to speak, Suwaunock made no apology for his attack on the villages of the enemy. "The Pawnee met my young men upon the hunt and slew them," he said through the translator. "I have had my revenge. Let them look at their town. I found it filled with lodges: I left it a heap of ashes."

Although the meeting resulted in a peace agreement between the two tribes, sporadic killings and horse thievery continued on.

(C.A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians - A History, 1972 / 2000)

[pellethie]

I’m sure the Lenape ‘schooled’ those Pawnee.


As tribes such as the Lenape, Wyandotte, Potowatomi and Shawnee were forced across the Mississippi, they too took up buffalo hunting which no doubt put these former woodland hunter/warriors in close proximity with plains tribes. I’ve heard one account of Lenape and Shawnee hunters in the 19th century holding off a large force of Comanche and Kiowa on the southern plains.

Of course there had been conflict between the woodland people and the plains people long before the 19th century. The Asakiwaki(Sauk) and Meskwaki(Fox) had long been at odds with the Wazhazhe, Missouria and other Dhegihan speaking people whom the woodland Algonquians pushed out of the Ohio valley in pre-Columbian times. Those eastern Siouan tribes remaining in the east such as the Catawba, Yamasee, Yuchi, Saponi, Monacan and Manahoac were in constant conflict with the woodland Algonquian and Iroquoian people.

Although there are a few accounts of such battles passed down, we can only imagine what took place during these bloody interactions. There has been talk concerning how Algonquians drifting down into the Chesapeake Bay region forced Siouan tribes west past the fall line and were still fighting them when the English landed at Jamestown. Then there are the historical accounts of the Cherokee, Haudenosaunee and Shawnee being at war with these displaced Siouan tribes as well as the Siouan Catawba and Yamasee.