Panka

The Panka, known as the Ponca, are the smallest of the five Dhegiha Siouan peoples and speak a language almost identical to Omaha. Their traditions recall a homeland east of the Mississippi from which they were driven, with the other Dhegiha tribes, by the Beaver Wars of the Haudenosaunee.

At first European contact they lived at the mouth of the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska. Unlike most Plains nations the Ponca were settled farmers, growing maize and keeping vegetable gardens beside the Missouri.

In 1789 the fur trader Juan Baptiste Munier opened a post among some eight hundred Ponca, but smallpox reduced them to about two hundred by the time Lewis and Clark passed in 1804. In 1824 Lakota warriors ambushed thirty Ponca leaders and killed all the chiefs, including Smoke-maker; only twelve survived.