"This is a beautiful morning [ ] some of our men have gone horse back to seek out a fording on the Platt [ ] we left our place of encampment about noon and traveled about five miles to the place that Miller forded the loupe fork of the Platt and found it to be a very difficult place of crossing on account of the quick sand and the swiftness of the stream [ ] we crossed over 4 of the wagons without much loading in them and that with difficulty [ ] it was now night and we formed our ring for the night on the bank of the stream [ ] just above us lay the ruins of the Pawnee village from whence they were driven last summer by the Sioux [ ] I went to the ruins together with many of the brethern to get wood to cook our suppers [ ] we surveyed the ground where the city once stood [ ] the houses or wigwams were nearly all burnt [ ] they had the appearance of having been large and commodious [ ] I was in one suported by posts set in the ground in the form of a cone with a hole in the center of the roof for the smoke to escape [ ] it was 50 feet across the center of the base"
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The following was sent to me by a great-great grandson Brian Harper telling some history behind this entry:
"In the coming days of the diary, Grandpa Harper makes several references to the Pawnee. I did a little research and learned that in April of 1847 the Pawnee were in the middle of being literally wiped out. The Pawnee were one of the friendliest tribes to the Whites. They maintained peaceful relations with the settlers and served as scouts for the US army in trying to control the Sioux, who were much less friendly and prone to attacking settlers and the army. Consequently, the Sioux inflicted considerable vengeance on the Pawnee as punishment for assisting the Whites. Charles makes reference in his diary to visiting an abandoned and burned Pawnee village in Nebraska. This would not have been an uncommon sight in 1847. While the Sioux were busy burning their villages, the United States Government, seeing them as an easy non-violent target, took more and more Pawnee land. White settlers and military expeditions brought smallpox and by 1890 there were only 821 Pawnee still living to which the government then rounded up and hauled off to a reservation in Oklahoma. For the fact that they were one of the most welcoming tribes to American settlers, they were literally eradicated as a consequence. In 1975 the US Government awarded the survivors of the Pawnee tribe several million dollars and some land in their native Nebraska where some effort has since been made to establish recovery of their people and traditions. It's fascinating to me how everything is so connected....one little sentence in an old diary offers a clue to something that an entirely different race of people was experiencing at the exact same time."
Interesting, isn't it? What I think is so neat about this entry is that he mentions the ruins of the Pawnee and then writes "from whence they were driven last summer by the Sioux". How did he know the events of last summer with the Pawnee and the Sioux even spelling Sioux correctly. The events of his life the previous year had to have been hectic in and of itself after being run out of Nauvoo in the early springtime...then traveling to Winter Quarters...then settling there and preparing themselves to go to the 'tops of the mountains' the following year. He and all the pioneers were busy. They had no idea where they were going. They were dependent on Brigham and the Lord for that, and it's not likely they had history books of the region to gain information as to what was ahead. The Pawnee and the Sioux were western tribes in terms of the United States boundaries at the time. It's hard to imagine how they knew what went on with the Pawnee and the Sioux culturally and what other tribes were out there. They had to have had some information...traders, trappers, mountain men who had been out there. It would be interesting to know.
