Skiri

The Skiri, or Skidi, were the northernmost of the four bands of the Pawnee, calling themselves the Look-like-Wolves People and known to French traders as the Loups, or Wolf Pawnee.

Farming maize and squash in earth-lodge villages, they once lived on the Republican River but moved north to the upper Loup River under mounted Apache raids and united their settlements about 1680. In 1720 they annihilated the Spanish Villasur expedition at dawn outside their Loup River villages, killing Villasur and forty-five Spaniards.

The Skiri were the keepers of the feared Morning Star ritual, in which a captive girl was sacrificed for the renewal of the crops, until reformers such as Petalesharo, who cut a Comanche captive from the scaffold in 1817, gained the upper hand. Smallpox cut the band from eight large villages in 1725 to one by 1800.