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Logan Fontenelle, a fur trader, by marriage had allied himself to the protection of the Pawnees. You will see his portrait in the rotunda of the Fontenelle Hotel in Omaha—a clean, strong, terribly strong face. He was finally killed by fourteen arrows in a battle defending the Pawnees from Northern Sioux. To give you an example of the ferocity of those halcyon days before white men came: an Iowa Indian had killed an Omaha boy by spearing his living body to the ground. The Iowa who did it was drunk. No matter. Fontenelle’s Indian wife took an ax, watched her chance when the drunk slept off his torpor, entered the shanty where he slept, plunged the ax in the murderer’s head and escaped by jumping through the shanty window.

Five miles out on Elkhorn River, between the site of General Dodge’s first cabin and the modern city of Omaha, you will find the name on rail maps commemorating an almost unknown episode. In 1852 the flood tide of Westward Ho was at its height to Utah and California. A brutal blacksmith on his way to California had sworn he would shoot the first Indian he saw just to “have a nick in his gun.” He did. His victim was a Pawnee boy. Now when the Mormons began moving across from Kanesville (Council Bluffs) to Omaha (Florence) they had made a treaty with Big Elk for a lease of land during five years till they could move the people gradually westward; and both parties had respected and observed that treaty; but here was a frightful crime unprovoked against the Pawnees. The Mormons did not want to stain their hands by becoming hangmen. Neither did any of the other Pioneers, though crimes later along the Trail compelled them to overcome that reluctance. They handed the white murderer over to the Pawnees for punishment. The Pawnees tied him to a wagon wheel and skinned him alive. For years this gruesome spot was known as Rawhide.