Two years later, the majority of the Ponca were given the opportunity to return to Nebraska but elected against doing so, having established themselves on a new reservation in the Indian Territory.

Siouan-speaking tribes such as the Omaha, Osage, Quapaw and Kaw also have traditions of having migrated to the West from east of the Mississippi River.

In 1789, fur trader Juan Baptiste Munier was given an exclusive license to trade with the Ponca at the mouth of the Niobrara River.

[9] In 1858 the Ponca signed a treaty by which they gave up parts of their land to the United States in return for protection from hostile tribes and a permanent reservation home on the Niobrara.

[11] In the 1868 US-Sioux Treaty of Fort Laramie[12] the US mistakenly included all Ponca lands in the Great Sioux Reservation.

When Congress decided to remove several northern tribes to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in 1876, the Ponca were on the list.

After inspecting the lands the US government offered for their new reservation and finding it unsuitable for agriculture, the Ponca chiefs decided against a move to the Indian Territory.

In order to carry out his promise, Standing Bear left the reservation in Oklahoma and traveled back toward the Ponca homelands.

In Standing Bear v. Crook (1879), held in Omaha, Nebraska, the US District Court established for the first time that Native Americans are "persons within the meaning of the law" of the United States, and that they have certain rights as a result.

[2] In 1881, the US returned 26,236 acres (106 km2) of Knox County, Nebraska to the Ponca, and about half the tribe moved back north from Indian Territory.

In the 1930s, the University of Nebraska and the Smithsonian Institution conducted an archeological project[13] to identify and save prehistoric artifacts before they were destroyed during agricultural development.

The team excavated a prehistoric Ponca village, which included large circular homes up to sixty feet in diameter, located almost two miles (3 km) along the south bank of the Niobrara River.

[2] After the 1877 forced relocation onto the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory, the tribe moved west to their own lands along the Arkansas and Salt Fork Rivers.

In an attempt to encourage assimilation (and to allow Oklahoma to become a state), they allotted reservation lands to individual members under the Dawes Act in 1891 and 1892.