In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

There once was a network of Native American trails that crisscrossed the Great Plains. These pathways in turn were a segment of a much larger web that covered the North American continent. Most of the trails were old in 1492, and features that they shared made them important to later travelers. Explorers, traders, and army expeditions all followed them, and by channeling movements of people the trails had a profound influence on the early Euro-American history of the Plains. Unfortunately, there have been few comprehensive studies of Native American trails, and memories of many have faded. Myer’s catalog of trails in Tennessee is a notable exception.1 He provides a detailed account of dozens of trails in that state and summary descriptions of many in the surrounding region. In contrast to his encyclopedic approach, studies of native trails on the Great Plains have tended to be region-specific,2 limited to a single portion of a trail,3 or even site-specific.4 What I will do here is make available full information on one trail and place it properly in what is a very rich historical context. To this end, in this chapter I will discuss the nature of native trails on the Plains and the features associated with them. In so doing, I will be using information gathered since 1984. In that year Bob Blasing, one of my students at Wichita State University, encountered evidence for a native trail in a survey of the upper portion of the Deep Creek valley in east-central Kansas . Our discussions of the significance of his find convinced both of us of the research potential of such trails. A subsequent survey at Wilson Lake, Kansas, located a portion of the Pawnee Trail. The report of that survey (Blakeslee, Blasing, and Garcia 1986) provided then-current information on the trail, but only limited numbers of the report were printed, and the data it contained have faded into the foggy realm of seldom-cited archaeo3 .TracingthePawneeTrail Tracing the Pawnee Trail 31 logical contract reports.5 Partly to introduce these data to a larger audience but also to correct some errors and to add new data, the Pawnee Trail is described here. The system of trails that covered North America was not accidental in nature but developed over the millennia from the needs of the native peoples and from their intimate knowledge of the landscape. Knowledge of the terrain allowed them to link potential campsites with easily traveled roads, and their home villages with needed resources. Through knowledge of their land, they were able not only to avoid difficult routes but to use camps that provided for most or all of their needs. Campsites were located in spots that provided the necessities of life, and the trails sometimes provided resources as well. Finally, the trails themselves led to places the travelers intended to go: other villages, hunting grounds, quarries, shrines. The uses to which trails were put determine much about them. They were used, of course, for hunting, and in the early Historic period on the Plains, hunting expeditions could involve whole villages marching together over hundreds of miles. The Pawnee bands of central Nebraska went to northwestern Kansas and western Nebraska to hunt,6 while the Osages who lived in western Missouri and eastern Kansas traveled west beyond the Arkansas River to southwestern Kansas and western Oklahoma.7 Trade and intertribal visits took groups, small and large, sometimes short and sometimes enormous distances.8 The Pawnee visited annually with Wichita bands living in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, while one Kiowa band from Oklahoma and Texas regularly visited the Crow in Wyoming and Montana.9 Some intertribal visits were formal and involved hundreds to thousands of people, but other informal visits could be made by single individuals and families.10 Warfare was another reason for travel. The term “warpath” is part and parcel of our stereotype of Native Americans, but the warpath in seasons of peace was also the route of the hunt, commerce, and religion. Only the larger war parties tended to use the trails away from home, however, as a small group could be spotted easily and overcome while traveling a widely known route. Migrations probably also followed old trails, but our evidence for this is scanty. Recent studies of migrations have shown that the travelers were likely to have been moving along known paths into previously known territory.11 That the route called the Old North Trail links the new...

Share