Ponca Trail of Tears
In 1877, the U.S. Government forcibly relocated the Ponca Nation from their homeland in Nebraska to Indian Territory in Oklahoma after treaties were repeatedly violated. This was part of a larger pattern of Indian Removal in the nineteenth century.
The Ponca Nation occupied areas of what is today northern Nebraska and southeastern of South Dakota during late prehistoric and early historic times. The Indigenous people migrated over time from the Ohio Valley to Minnesota, before ultimately settling in Nebraska near the Missouri and Niobrara rivers. The Missouri River was not just a source of water, but it also was a burial place for Ponca leaders. The Niobrara River and Ponca Creek also shaped their lives, offering fertile soil for farming and resources for everyday life. Additionally, landmarks like the Twin Buttes served ceremonial purposes and provided a clear view of the surrounding area, which the Ponca used to plan and protect their settlements. The land was important to their way of life, making their forced removal from it all the more devastating.
Over the fifty years prior to their removal, the Ponca Nation made four treaties with the U.S. government. The Ponca ceded significant parts of their land through these treaties, their land base becoming smaller and smaller with each agreement. In the final treaty with the US government, in 1865, the Ponca ceded all their land to the United States because they were promised different land and protection. However, as is the case with much of Native American history, the United States government did not keep their promise to the Ponca and promised the same land to the Great Sioux Nation. This cession of land and the following broken promise by the US government is what ultimately led to the removal of the Ponca from their lands and to Indian territory in Oklahoma.
The Ponca provided alternative solutions to the land dispossession created by the U.S. government. They proposed moving to the Omaha reservation or making peace with the Sioux. However, U.S. officials had made up its mind about the Ponca moving and was unwilling to change it. The US government then got “consent” not from the majority of the Ponca chiefs, because they were not willing to move, but from “the two elderly and blind Chiefs that [U.S. Indian inspector Edward Kemble] had taken with him from the Indian Territory."
The journey to Indian Territory was arduous due to heavy spring rains that made roads impassable. Many tribal members suffered from disease and hardship. Several children like White Buffalo Girl perished along the route that became known as the Ponca “Trail of Tears.” The people of Neligh, Nebraska, provided a Christian funeral for the child and an oak cross was erected at the gravesite. In 1913, a marble monument was erected and the grave has been maintained and decorated in memory of White Buffalo Girl and the Ponca Nation.
The Ponca Trail of Tears was part of a U.S. reservation policy for Native Americans during the nineteenth century. Many other Indigenous nations that were forced to move from their ancestral homelands to the Indian territory in Oklahoma. The removal of the Native Americans to open up "free land" for White settlement was a traumatizing act, "removal was also an act of all-encompassing violence."
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