No one actually knows how Pawnee Rock was named. Josiah Gregg, who had traveled the Santa Fe Trail eight times beginning in 1831, wrote that Pawnee Rock was said to have been named for a battle once fought nearby between the Pawnee and another tribe, and called the huge boulder a rallying point for the Indians and one of the mighty landmarks of this continental journey. Each summer, the Pawnees left their villages in Nebraska and northern Kansas and journeyed south to the Arkansas River region to hunt buffalo, placing them in the Pawnee Rock vicinity during the peak travel months of the Santa Fe Trail. Because trail travelers and the Indians usually left each other alone, outright fighting was unusual, with tensions erupting only eighteen times in a twenty-nine-year period between 1822 and 1851, most of the fights occurring within twenty-five miles of this site. At times the Pawnees fought their traditional enemies, the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas, all nomadic tribes that depended on buffalo and plants from this area. Heavy use of the Santa Fe Trail, along with trail travelers hunting wildlife and grazing thousands of mules and oxen, forced tribes into the territories of their enemies, and Plains Indians fought one another and trail travelers to protect their territories and their most important food source, the buffalo.