Like other groups of Indian scouts, Pawnee men were recruited in large numbers to aid in the ongoing conflicts between settlers and the Native Americans in the United States.

When General Samuel Ryan Curtis began recruiting for scouts to help him in an offensive against other tribes in the region, he convinced seventy Pawnee to join him.

North would eventually be put in command of the scouts and promoted to captain and then major, a position he held until the final disbandment of the unit in 1877.

In the fight, about 200 United States soldiers and 70 Indian Scouts (including 30 of the Pawnee) captured an Arapaho village containing about 500 people, mostly women and children, under Medicine Man.

In March 1867 Major North was authorized to enlist four, fifty-man companies of scouts for protecting the Union Pacific Railroad, then under construction.

The "Pawnee Battalion", as it was called, was active in the Comanche War, fighting against Chief Turkey Leg and his band of Northern Cheyenne.

In 1869, North and fifty scouts guided Colonel Eugene Asa Carr's Republican River Expedition through Colorado and fought in the Battle of Summit Springs on July 11.

The battle put approximately 300 Americans and Pawnees up against 450 to 900 encamped Arapaho, Sioux and Cheyenne under the command of Chief Tall Bull.

Major North and his men arrived at the fort on October 22 and immediately thereafter began a march to the camp of Chief Red Cloud with a regiment of cavalry.

In November, 1876, General Ranald S. Mackenzie led seventy Pawnee scouts and 800 cavalrymen into the Big Horn Mountains to attack a "well concealed" Cheyenne camp.