The Children of Men
James H. Locklear
3 June 2025
In the mellow, rolling pastureland between the Nebraska towns of Guide Rock and Red Cloud, on a high hill above the south bank of the Republican River, a village cemetery lingers. But if you wade through the bluestem to the top of the hill you will find no headstones and, scanning the valley below, you will find no village. The Pawnees are long gone.
The community that once spread out from the base of this hill was no temporary encampment. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was a rocking, full blown town of forty-four earth lodges, home to an estimated sixteen hundred men, women, and children, not to mention their horses and dogs. It even had fields for sporting contests. An historian once told me that you could probably hear and smell a Pawnee town long before you actually saw it.
So strategic was this village that in 1806 military expeditions from both Spain and the United States of America nearly ran into each other trying to court the allegiance of the local chiefs.
First on the scene was Lieutenant Facundo Melgares, whose force of militia and dragoons marched nearly seven hundred miles from Santa Fe to visit this village, part of a diplomatic excursion to the frontier tribes. Melgares must have been well received because five weeks later a dismayed Lieutenant Zebulon Pike of the United States Army reached the village only to find the Spanish flag flapping above the earth lodges. Not only had the Spanish made inroads with the village, Pike realized the influence of the French fur-trade when a Pawnee chief greeted him with a hearty Bon jour!
Pike and his troops hung around for thirteen days and eventually persuaded the Pawnees to lower the colors of Spain and hoist the Stars and Stripes.
Historians and archaeologists would later refer to this community as the Pike Pawnee Village. It was occupied by the Kitkahahki Pawnee, a band that broke away from the main Pawnee settlements in the Loup and Platte River valleys of present east-central Nebraska in the late 1700s. It is also known as the Hill Site after Asa T. Hill, a local archaeologist who led investigations of the village and its environs in the 1920s, investigations that included the “opening” of graves up on the hill.
In addition to flags, another token used by Euro-Americans to cement relations with plains Indians was the gifting of “peace medals” to key figures in the tribe. Resembling large coins, the medals bore the image of a king or other significant personage. Several of these were found during the excavation of graves up on the hill. That the excavations yielded Spanish, British, and American peace medals speaks volumes about the standing of the village in the geopolitical maneuverings of the day.
Having stood upon the hill, having read about the medals, I found myself with a strange desire to actually see one. I contacted the Nebraska State Historical Society and found they did indeed have peace medals from the Pike Pawnee Village in their holdings. My timing was fortunate, since the medals were about to be returned to the Pawnee tribe for repatriation.
Led by a curator down to the Society’s basement, two medals were brought forth from a drab steel storage cabinet. There was something deeply stirring about seeing this history in person.
The curator asked if I wanted to see other artifacts taken from the graves, since these too were soon to be repatriated. Among them was a wonderfully crafted smoking pipe carved from Catlinite, the famous red stone quarried by Indigenous peoples for centuries from outcrops in Minnesota.
The stem of the pipe was about five inches long, ending in an upright, square-sided bowl two inches tall. The carver had skillfully fashioned the effigy of a bear on the stem, standing on all fours, facing the smoker.
I remembered seeing this thing before, pictured in a book where I first learned of the peace medals. Back home that evening, thumbing through the pages, I found the image again. My curiosity aroused, I tracked down an account of Mr. Hill’s investigation in which he states this “beautiful pipe of the rarest workmanship” most likely belonged to a Pawnee chief, an opinion shared by Waldo Wedel of the Smithsonian Institution who speculated it may have been used in tribal ceremonies.
But there was more. The pipe was found, not with the remains of a chief, but in the grave of a child. Suddenly, the medals lost their magic.
…..
On high ground above the Red Vermillion River in the Kansas Flint Hills stands another prairie cemetery. It overlooks the point where the Oregon Trail crossed the Red Vermillion and is the resting place of travelers and settlers whose lives came here to an end.
Walking there one day among the pioneer-era headstones, many marking the passing of infants and small children, lingering over the inscriptions, I felt a strange sensation rising in my arms—a tingling passing into an ache passing into the impulse to draw my forearms up to my chest. It was the urge to cradle, to wrap my arms around an unspeakable, child-shaped hollow.
As the father of three, I knew the sweetness of cradling a little one. But I had never lost a child. What would my body know of such sorrow? It seemed to me like phantom pain, memory pain, the kind felt when a limb is lost.
Esteemed Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson once declared, “The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.” If he was right, and an individual human being is nothing more than cleverly packaged DNA, the vehicle by which a particular set of genetic material perpetuates itself, then what I experienced on the Vermillion was just some sort of Darwinian alarm, an upwelling of panic from the desolate, biochemical machinery of my genome: Feel that pain? Good! Losing progeny is not adaptive!
But I know what I felt that day—the grief of soul sundered from soul, a tearing in the fabric of the cosmos so profoundly wrong and so universally shattering that I could physically experience the pain of another human being, one whose arms had been emptied indeed.
…..
And what of the Pawnee man, who buried his exquisite pipe in the ground? I see him rising at dawn, emerging from his earth lodge, its entrance delivering him, as tradition ordained, to the sunrise. His face awash in daybreak, he is glancing over his right shoulder, to the south, up the hill, an ache slowly rising in his arms.
