By the early 1600s, the ancestors of the Pawnee Nation had begun consolidating into a few large communities, each home to hundreds, if not thousands, of people, and some of these were built along nearby Shell Creek. These Shell Creek cities may have been built by ancestors of the Čawî, Kitkehahki, and Pîtahawirâta bands, while oral tradition mentions an ancestral group, the Kawarakîs, and the other major division of the Pawnee, the Ckîri, built their early communities near Genoa. The Shell Creek villages were occupied before the Pawnees acquired horses and guns, though a few items of European manufacture found at these sites show direct or indirect contact with early French traders. During this time, the Pawnees made a beautiful assortment of tools and ornaments fashioned from bone, stone, shell, antler, and clay, built and lived in sturdy earth lodges, timber-framed lodges covered with earth, and occupied these lodges for decades. Community members grew large amounts of corn and other crops, then went on long-distance hunting trips into Kansas, using dogs to carry home processed buffalo meat and stone for tool manufacture.