Kitkehaki

The Kitkehahki are one of the four bands of the Pawnee, a Caddoan-speaking people of the central Great Plains, and their name means Little Muddy Bottom Village. As the southernmost of the Pawnee South Bands they were often called the Republican Pawnee, after their earth-lodge villages on the Republican River. Their villagers farmed corn, beans and pumpkins in the river valley and left each season to hunt buffalo on the open plains.

In the early eighteenth century the Pawnee together numbered more than twelve thousand, but pressure from the Lakota, Dakota and Cheyenne and repeated epidemics gradually weakened them.

In 1806 Zebulon Pike of an American expedition visited their main village and persuaded the Kitkehahki to accept the American flag, and in 1818 they signed the Treaty of St. Louis as the Pawnee Republic.