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They had heard how the Poncas had been moved off without warning and without reason. Standing Bear was not being allowed to stay; he had lost his country forever. The same thing might happen to the Omahas. They had a similar treaty with the United States. They thought that they owned their lands. They had been improving them and living on them for years.
The old chief refused to have the boy buried in the strange country, and, gathering about thirty members of his tribe together, he started for their ancient hunting-grounds, intending to bury his boy where generations of the Poncas chiefs lay.
The Poncas, numbering 735, have a reservation of 576,000 acres, near the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers, in the south-eastern part of the Territory, provided for them in their treaty with the United States, made in 1858.
Even should this prove to be the Quicourt or Rapid River, it would not be prudent to winter much further down upon its banks, as, though they might be out of the range of the Sioux, they would be in the neighborhood of the Poncas, a tribe nearly as dangerous.
They stayed ten days, to rest; then the Otos gave them each a pony, and in two more weeks they were home. It had been a cold, hungry journey, of five hundred miles, and their relatives and friends were glad to see them again. But the United States inspector was waiting for them. He was angry. He said that the Great Father had ordered the Poncas to change homes.
This continued for nine years, until, by the raids of the Sioux, one fourth of the Poncas had been killed or captured. Still they had not been told by the United States that these lands were theirs no longer; but, suddenly, in 1877, they were told that they must get out. At this time they had three villages, on the lower Niobrara River, and eight bands, each under a chief.
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