The Ponca (once part of the Omaha) tribe was very small when Lewis and Clark met them in 1804.  There were only about 700 of them during the 1800s.  They lived along the west bank of the Missouri River in Nebraska in the early 1700s.  The Sioux Indians would raid the Ponca and sometimes kill their warriors.
     The Ponca lived in "Earth Lodges" in the winter and tepees in the summer when they were hunting. They raised corn, squash, and beans as crops. They hunted for their meat.
     Many Ponca Indians died from diseases brought to them by contact with white people.  About one-third of them died in the 1800s from smallpox or malaria.  These were diseases that had never been found in area before the white settlers came.
     The Ponca Tribe did not go to war with any other tribe or the United States settlers after 1825. The United States signed a many treaties with the Poncas.  One of the last treaties gave them 96,000 acres of land for a Ponca Reservation in Knox and Boyd counties in Nebraska. But, in 1868 a treaty was signed at Fort Laramie that changed things forever.  That treaty gave the Sioux Indian Nation the land that had first been given to the Poncas. They asked the US government for help and it took years to get any.
     In 1876 that a group of Ponca chiefs were offered land in Oklahoma by the government.  They found that the land was not good.  The US government told them they could go back to Nebraska if they did not like the land, but that is not what happened.  They were forced to move to the new land.  On the long journey to Oklahoma one in every three Indians died.  One of the Indians refused to bury his daughter in Oklahoma and took her back to Nebraska.  The government arrested him and a couple of lawyers from Omaha helped the Indian.  They went to court to prove that an Indian was a person under the law.  This lead to the Ponca Indians getting 26,236 acres of land in Knox County, Nebraska back to be used as their homeland.
      Only half of the Ponca Indians who had moved to Oklahoma returned to Nebraska.
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