"A Rallying Point for the Indians"

"A Rallying Point for the Indians". . , No one actually knows how Pawnee Rock was named. Josiah Gregg, who had been over the Santa Fe Trail eight times beginning in 1831, wrote: the attention of the traveller is directed to the ‘Pawnee Rock' so called, it is said, on account of a battle’s having once been fought hard by, between the Pawnee and some other tribe., We passed the Pawnee Rock, a huge boulder which for centuries has been a rallying point for the Indians, and still stands, in its solitary majesty, one of the mighty landmarks of this continental journey. , Joseph Allyn Pratt, associate justice, Arizona Territory , 1863, Each summer the Pawnees left their villages in Nebraska and northern Kansas and journeyed south to the Arkansas River region to hunt buffalo. The annual migration placed them in the Pawnee Rock vicinity during the peak travel months of the Santa Fe Trail. Because the trail travelers and the Indians usually left each other alone, outright fighting was unusual. Tensions erupted only eighteen times in a twenty-nine-year period between 1822 and 1851. Most of the fights were within twenty-five miles of this site., On occasion the Pawnees battled their traditional enemies – the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas. All of these nomadic tribes depended upon buffalo and plants from this area. Heavy use of the Santa Fe Trail, and the results of trail travelers hunting wildlife and grazing thousands of mules and oxen, forced tribes into the territories of their enemies. Plains Indians fought one another and trail travelers to protect their territories and their most important food source – the buffalo.