-then there were the Pawnee, made out to be such badasses in Dancing with Wolves and always noted but not documented that much in stuff I've read.
About the time Dances With Wolves was coming out I had a conversation with an Indian woman in Oklahoma City, she said the Pawnees STILL had a dark reputation among the tribes up there. As for being documented by White folks, one has to take that with a grain of salt. A LOT of events important personally to the tribe invilved never made it in much detail to our own history, especially if it didn't affect us.
Consider the catastrophic die-offs among the Comanches in the Texas era, far exceeding deaths in combat by whole orders of magnitude, yet almost entirely undocumented. We INFER these deaths by what must have happened.
Elesewhere, one likewise has to distiguish between pre- and post-epidemic populations. Prior to the massive smallpox epidemic of the 1830's the Blackfeet were the baddest thing on the block on the Northern Plains, and the Mandans and Arikaras dominated their respective regions. The Lakota Sioux filling a power vaccuum only after the near-demise of these groups.
With respect to the Pawnees, weren't it a Pawnee that misguided Coronado from New Mexico clear to Kansas in a successful bid on said Pawnee's part to get home?
If one uses where Indians raided as the definition of territory, things get even more fuzzy. That would put much of Mexico in the Kiowas' orbit (and lets not forget the allied Kiowa-Apaches either
). I have read too of Apaches from New Mexico stealing horses around Nacodoches in East Texas in the late Eighteenth Century.
A similar feat accomplished by Lipan and Mescalero Apaches out of Fort Stanton NM in the early 1880's when they raided almost to Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country.
I would define Comancheria as the area where Comanches were likely to set up camp on a regular basis, with the understanding that other groups might even then pass right through there, as we ourselves did when establishing the Santa Fe trade route.
Birdwatcher
