Pitahauerat

The Pitahauerat, also called the Tappage, were one of the principal Pawnee bands of the central North American Plains. Their villages lay in the Platte River country, where families lived in earth-covered lodges and planted maize and other crops. Seasonal bison hunts took them away from the villages onto the grasslands. Their name was associated with a position downstream or to the east among the Pawnee communities.

By the late eighteenth century the Pitahauerat were recorded as a distinct band alongside the Chaui, Kitkehahki and Skidi. Pawnee villages moved and sometimes combined as circumstances changed. In the early nineteenth century smallpox epidemics in 1803 and 1825, and growing pressure from neighboring peoples and newcomers strained the Pawnee communities of the Platte River valley.