The Ponca Trail of Tears is the route of the forced removal of the Ponca people from their Nebraska homeland to Indian Territory in 1877. It runs from Ponca Creek in the north of the state, south and east out of Nebraska. Within a year of the march, roughly a third of the tribe had died.
The homeland
The Ponca lived along Ponca Creek, which rises in Boyd County, runs east past Lynch, and joins the Missouri River east of Verdel in Knox County. They farmed and hunted from earth-lodge villages here for generations. This is Highway 12 country today, the Missouri River corridor along Nebraska’s northern border.
The removal, 1877
In 1877 the federal government forced the Ponca from this country and marched them to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. The journey was made in bad weather with inadequate supplies. People died along the way, and many more died in the first year after arrival.
White Buffalo Girl, Neligh
On 23 May 1877 a Ponca child died on the march near Neligh in Antelope County. She was one year and six months old, the daughter of Black Elk and Moon Hawk. Her stone in Laurel Hill Cemetery reads: “White Buffalo Girl, Daughter of Black Elk and Moon Hawk of Ponca Tribe, Died May 23, 1877, enroute from Ponca Creek to Indian Territory. Aged one year six months.”
Her father asked the white residents of Neligh to look after the grave. His words are recorded: “I want the whites to respect the grave of my child just as they do the graves of their own dead. I leave the grave in your care. I may never see it again. Care for it for me.”
Neligh has tended the grave ever since, for nearly a century and a half. In 1960 a monument company from Tilden reset the marker on a new foundation. The grave is on the Highway 275 corridor at Neligh, at the southern end of the Nebraska section of the trail.
Those who stayed
Not every Ponca went south. Local accounts in Knox County hold that some hid in the broken country near Mars, south of Pischellville and close to Venus, rather than be taken. This is remembered locally rather than recorded in the official histories of the removal, and it is set down here as local knowledge.
Standing Bear walks home
In 1879 Chief Standing Bear left Indian Territory to bury his son in the homeland, walking north with a small band. They were arrested. The case that followed, heard in Omaha, produced the ruling that a Native American is a person under the law of the United States, with the right to a hearing. It is one of the most consequential court decisions ever to come out of Nebraska.
Some of the Ponca stayed north. In time 26,000 acres in Knox County were restored to the tribe, and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska is a federally recognized nation today, with the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma descended from those who remained in the south.
Visiting the trail today
Niobrara, Knox County
The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska maintains powwow grounds, a museum and an educational trail at Niobrara, on ancestral homeland. The museum building dates to the 1930s and was built with Civilian Conservation Corps help as tribal government headquarters; staff give guided tours during working hours. The educational trail is open year round and includes statues telling traditional Ponca stories, a recreated earth lodge visitors can walk into, and a statue of Chief Standing Bear overlooking the grounds. The tribe’s buffalo herd is often visible.
The Annual Northern Ponca Powwow is held on the second weekend of August and is open to all.
Neligh, Antelope County
White Buffalo Girl’s grave is in Laurel Hill Cemetery, marked and maintained, with a state historical marker telling the story.
Along the corridors
The Nebraska section of the trail links two of the state’s travel corridors. Highway 12 follows the Missouri River across the north, past Niobrara and the mouth of Ponca Creek. Highway 275 runs south-east through Neligh, where White Buffalo Girl is buried. Between the two the route crosses Highway 20. Boyd County, Knox County and Antelope County all lie on the route.
Related pages on this site
- Niobrara and Knox County
- Neligh and Antelope County
- Lynch and Boyd County
- Highway 12 corridor
- Highway 275 corridor
- Highway 20 corridor
- Chief Standing Bear Trail — a rail trail the Ponca Tribe owns at Beatrice in Gage County, near the Kansas line. Far south of the homeland, and tied to this story by Standing Bear rather than by geography