Pitahwarita

The Pitahwarita, or Pitahawirata, were one of the three southern bands of the Pawnee, Caddoan-speaking earth-lodge villagers whose name means People Downstream.

Until the 1770s they lived with other southern bands and the Wichita on the Arkansas River, but Osage pressure drove the Pawnee north. Tradition remembers the Pitahwarita following the Chaui into Nebraska between 1774 and 1777 to build earth lodges on the Platte. They farmed maize, beans and squash and left each year for the communal bison hunt, sharing sacred bundles with other Pawnee.

About 1830, a Pitahwarita warrior captured the Cheyenne's Sacred Arrows in battle; the Cheyenne stopped fighting, and the Skidi chief Big Eagle took the arrows into keeping. Smallpox halved the Pawnee nation in 1831, and in 1833 the Pitahwarita joined the four-band treaty on the Platte that ceded lands south of the river to the United States.