Tsawi

The Tsawi, whose name means People in the Middle and who were called the Grand Pawnee, were the leading southern Pawnee band. They spoke Caddoan, lived in earth lodges, farmed river bottoms and hunted bison seasonally.

With other southern Pawnee and the Wichita they held the Arkansas River country by 1750, until the better-armed Osage pushed the Pawnee north. The Tsawi led the migration into Nebraska between 1774 and 1777, settling on the Platte River. As nominal chiefs of the southern bands they spoke for the Pawnee, signing the Treaty of St. Louis in 1818.

Smallpox in 1831 halved the Pawnee population to between six and eight thousand. In 1833 four Pawnee bands signed a treaty with American commissioner Henry Ellsworth at the Grand Pawnee village, ceding their lands south of the Platte for annuities and a shared hunting ground.