In late September 1806 Lieutenant Zebulon Pike rode into a Kitkehahki Pawnee village on the Republican River with twenty-two men and found a Spanish flag flying. Lieutenant Facundo Melgares had left it there days before, after coming through with more than three hundred soldiers to keep the Pawnee on Spain's side. Pike spent a week working on the chief, whom the National Park Service names Characterish. At a council on September 29 he told the Pawnee it was impossible for the nation to have two fathers, and an elder took down the Spanish flag, laid it at Pike's feet and raised the American one. Then, by Pike's own account, he handed the Spanish flag back, "with the injunction that it should never be hoisted again during our stay." He left on October 7, and the next February Spanish soldiers took him prisoner.
The Kansas monument
Pike's journal did not fix the village on any map, and the Pawnee who could have pointed to it were removed to Indian Territory in 1875. The question fell to the people who had taken the valley. That same year Elizabeth Johnson, of White Rock, Kansas, came upon the remains of a Pawnee village in Republic County, studied Pike's journal and decided this was the place. She and her husband bought the land to keep it from the plow and gave it to Kansas in 1901. The state spent $3,000 on a fence and a 26-foot granite monument, and at its dedication speakers tied Pike's flag to the victory over Spain three years earlier. In 1906 a four-day festival marked the centennial.
The dig at Guide Rock
One of the people at those 1906 events was a Nebraskan, Asa T. Hill, and he came away convinced the village lay about twenty-five miles upriver, near Guide Rock in Webster County. In 1925 he bought the two farms on that ground to keep relic hunters off it, and dug. The site gave up more than twenty thousand artifacts, nearly half of them of European or American make, and among them a Spanish peace medal of 1797 bearing the head of Charles IV, an American peace medal of the kind issued after 1801, and buttons and brass ornaments matching those of Pike's infantry regiment. Historians now generally accept the Nebraska site, as even a Kansas exhibit does.
The error turned out to be a lucky one. Both villages were Kitkehahki homes, and the land Johnson saved kept its lodge floors; Kansas built the Pawnee Indian Museum over an excavated earth lodge there in 1967. The Nebraska village had already been worn down by farming. Named the Pike-Pawnee Village Site, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and belongs to the History Nebraska foundation, with no visitor center and no public access. A few lodge depressions are all that show.
What the two states argued over was where an American flag went up. The village under it is the part that lasted, and the river still carries the Republican band's name. Upstream, near Red Cloud, the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie keeps never-plowed grass of the kind that surrounded their lodges.