The earliest known remains of Osage tribal culture place them as longtime residents of present-day Missouri. Forest dwellers occupying a series of villages along the Missouri River system west of present-day St. Louis, the Osages are usually characterized by social scientists as a fringe Plains tribe because they ventured onto the Great Plains for extended buffalo hunts twice yearly. Linguistically, the Osages are counted among the Dhegiha Sioux, a grouping that includes the Quapaw, Ponca, and Kansa(Kaw).
The Osages believed they were the children of the "middle waters"—the universe of sky, earth, land, and water. Wah'Kon-Tah, the spiritual force creating and guiding the tribe, ended ga-ni-tha, or chaos, by separating the middle waters into the separate elements: air, earth, and water. The tribespeople were divided between the Tzi-sho, Sky People, who descended to earth from above, and the Hunkah, Earth People. Ancestry was traced to one of these two divisions, which were subdivided into twenty-four clans with numerous subclans. Leadership resided in a dual-chief system, the Sky People's leader responsible for matters of peace, the Earth People's chief leading in war.
Traditionally, Osage men wore their hair roached: they shaved their heads, including eyebrows, leaving only a scalplock of hair about two inches high and three inches wide running from just above the forehead to the neck. They wore loincloths, leggings, moccasins, and buffalo or bearskin robes. They pierced their ears to accommodate numerous ornaments, wore bracelets on their wrists and forearms, and tattooed their chests and arms.
Prior to European contact, Osage women wore their long hair loosely down their backs. They wore deerskin dresses, moccasins, and leggings. Dresses were cinched with wide belts of woven buffalo calf's hair and set off by earrings and bracelets. The women also tattooed themselves, usually more elaborately than the men, and perfumed themselves with chewed columbine seed. Young females were closely guarded by older women until marriages had been arranged.
The first non-Indians to encounter the Osages were French explorers navigating southward from New France in the 1670s. The French and Osages became business partners in the fur trade. The guns and horses the Osages acquired from the French enabled the tribe to dominate its region for more than a century. The Osages helped the French and other Indians to defeat British general Edward Braddock's forces in 1755, but were inactive during the ensuing colonial war. The tribe continued to use its geographical advantage to control trade along the Missouri River system, developing an alliance with the Spanish as the French presence faded. Prolonged contact with Europeans further affected the Osages as fur traders induced a split in the tribe; as a result, about half the people, under Chief Claremore, moved to Three Forks, in Arkansas.
Once Anglo-American settlement neared the tribal villages in Missouri and Arkansas, a series of diplomatic negotiations ensued. The Osages signed a treaty in 1808, agreeing to take up a reservation existence farther west, in present-day southern Kansas. There they lived, much as before, except that continued intermarriage with Euro-Americans resulted in a population of mixed bloods that by 1890 outnumbered the full bloods. During the Civil War many Osages sporadically fought for the Union. Despite this demonstration of loyalty the Osages were forced to sell their Kansas lands in 1871 and moved south across the border into Indian Territory.
The new 1.5-million-acre reservation in the northeastern part of the territory drew many non-Indians to live among the Osages before the tribal lands were allotted in 1906. Texas cattlemen leased the rich grasslands of the reservation's west side to fatten beef driven north to meet railheads in Kansas. This lease money, coupled with interest payments on the $8 million paid to the tribe for its Kansas holdings, allowed the Osages a degree of prosperity unknown among other territorial tribes. The tribe's Quaker agents thought them unduly independent as a consequence, noting the tribespeople's preference for self-governance, which was formalized in 1881 with the adoption of a written constitution.
Pressure to open Indian Territory to white settlement and create a new state increased during the 1890s. In preparation for that event, Congress insisted that all communally held Indian reservations be allotted and that tribal governments be abolished. The Osages resisted these ideas and in the end benefited from their intransigence. According to a 1906 agreement, unlike other tribes, which received individual allotments of 160 acres, with "surplus" land going to white settlers, the Osages received allotments of over five hundred acres each. Additionally, the Osages were able to insist on retaining their subsurface mineral estate as a tribe, rather than having the 2,229 allotted Osages individually receive mineral rights.
This latter arrangement proved fortuitous. After World War I and particularly during the 1920s, the Osages became widely heralded as "the richest group of people in the world" because of tribal revenues stemming from oil and natural-gas royalties. This mineral wealth was not an unmixed blessing. Exploiters of all kinds descended upon the Osages to separate them from their money, which was distributed by the government in quarterly payments. Also, Osages born after 1907 were not included on the allotment roll, so an ever-growing class of dispossessed tribespeople was created.
During the 1930s oil prices fell and tribal incomes contracted severely. Revenues from the "underground reservation" did not recover until the 1940s, and then only temporarily. The Arab oil embargo of the 1970s brought huge profits for those tribespeople who owned "head rights" to royalties, but these dropped precipitously in the late 1980s.
The effects of the mineral wealth on the tribe are pervasive. The notoriety brought exploitation and encouraged political factionalism. On the other hand, the oil and gas money enabled the Osages to insulate themselves from many aspects of the white man's road, which they abhorred. Their relative prosperity, although now much declined, contributed to a feeling of distinctiveness, one of the features that make the Osages different from other tribes, as well as from non-Indians.
Not until 1994 did the Osages inaugurate a tribal government separate from the business council whose sole responsibility became the approval of oil and gas leases. This had the effect of enfranchising tribal members who not did own head rights and helped create renewed interest in reviving and maintaining traditional culture.
John Joseph Mathews, The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); Terry P. Wilson, The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).
Terry P. Wilson
Potawatomi
University of California at Berkeley
