The Osages

The Osage were experienced traders, exchanging horses and Indian slaves for French guns, knives, axes, kettles, and other metal objects. When the Spanish assumed control of Louisiana in the 1760s, authorities banned trading for slaves, and the Osage adopted a new economic system of planting gardens in permanent villages, hunting in the plains while the crops grew, and trapping beaver, otter and other animals for the hide and fur trade in the winter fur-bearing months. At the time of the expedition, increased competition for hunting lands between Algonquian peoples such as the Sauks and Foxes, Lenape Delawares, Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Shawnees, and Illinois tribes created clashes, a trend that would increase through the 18th century.^[2]Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Vol. 2 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Government Printing Office, 1910), 157–58; Garrick A. … Continue reading

When the first Europeans landed in New England the tribe lived in the Ohio River valley. It consisted of two bands, the Wazhazhe or meat-eaters, and the Tsishu or vegetarians. When the first delegation of Osage chiefs met with Jefferson in 1804, their homes were near the forks of the Osage River. Their homeland extended from the Missouri River on the north to the Arkansas River on the south, and from the Mississippi to the Great Plains. Meriwether Lewis, in fact, sent a map of it to Jefferson from Fort Mandan in the spring of 1805.

The challenges confronting the Osage People were somewhat understood by Lewis and Clark, probably because of their working relationship with traders Auguste and Pierre Chouteau. The influential St. Louis family had worked for years for the right to trade with the Osage—struggling not with the Osage so much as three different Spanish governors whose various decrees were often at odds with Chouteau family’s ambitions. With the transfer of Louisiana to the United States, the Chouteaus saw an opportunity to regain an exclusive monopoly, and their cooperation, influence and help with the Lewis and Clark Expedition was immeasurable. While wintering at their camp on the Wood River, the captains worked with the Chouteaus to form a delegation bound for Washington City, and on 19 March 1804, they joined together to intercept a Kickapoo war party bound for the Osage.

Clark, the future agent for the privately held Missouri Fur Company, governor of Missouri Territory, and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, suggested in the expedition’s 1805 “Estimate of the Eastern Indians,” the following path forward for the Osage:

There is no doubt but their trade will increase: they could furnish a much larger quantity of beaver than they do. I think two villages, on the Osage river, might be prevailed on to remove to the Arkansas, and the Kansas, higher up the Missouri, and thus leave a sufficient scope of country for the Shawnees, Dillewars, Miames, and Kickapoos.^[3]Moulton, Journals, 3:391.

Tixier’s Description

Meriwether Lewis had no personal contacts with any Osage Indians until he returned to St. Louis after the expedition. Consequently, detailed descriptions of the Osages’ appearance like those he wrote of the Mandan, Lemhi Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Clatsop had to await the visit of Victor Tixier (1815-1885), a French physician who spent a year in America more than 30 years later. The description of the Osage men in his Voyage aux prairies osages, Louisiane et Missouri, 1839-40 were fully as thorough as Lewis’s would have been, and they show that the Osage nation still was as strong and viable as when Jefferson had entertained their leaders:

The men are tall and perfectly proportioned. They have at the same time all the physical qualities which denote skill and strength combined with graceful movements. . . .

. . . their ear[lobe]s, slit by knives, grow to be enormous, and they hang low under the weight of the ornaments with which they are laden. There is a complete lack of beard and eyebrows on their faces, for they carefully pull out the little hair which happens to grow there.

Their calm, dignified faces show great shrewdness; there is something soldierly and serious about the expression. Their hair is black and thick. The Osage shave their heads, except for the top, from which two strands of hair branch off and grow straight back to the occiput, where they form a tuft which falls to the lower part of the neck; between these strands grow two braids, the beauty of which consists in their length. . . .

The [Osage Indians] seldom go out without painting themselves; the colors they use are, first, vermillion, then verdigris [greenish-blue], and then yellow, which they buy from the trader; lacking these, they use ochre, chalk, or even mud. . . . The Osage always paint red that part of their head around their hair, the eye-sockets, and their ears; these are the national colors, the war-time paint. The other colors, indifferently put on the other parts of their bodies, depend upon their individual fancy.^[4]John Francis McDermott, editor, and Albert J. Salvan, translator, Tixier’s Travels on the Osage Prairies, 1844 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1940), 136-37.

After the Expedition

After the expedition, both Clark and Lewis would spend much time negotiating with the Osage. Just months after the expedition’s end on 26 September 1806, Lewis was appointed governor of Upper Louisiana Territory and Clark agent to all Indians west of the Mississippi. The agent for the Osage, however, was assigned to Pierre Chouteau. In 1808, Clark wrote his first Indian treaty in which he, in the words of historian Jay Buckley, “extorted” a huge land concession from Chief White Hair of the Osage. Clark received further land cessions from the Osage in 1818 and 1825.^[5]Jay H. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 76, 169; Bailey, 477.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the Osage adapted by becoming participants in the buffalo robe trade. During this period, the last people were moved to a reservation in Kansas. In the 1890s, oil was discovered there, and a decade later, the 1906 Osage Allotment Act sought dissolve the reservation. The tribe retained all mining rights and dispersed the land only to tribal members except for infrastructure such as villages, schools, and railroads. Revenue from mineral leases in 1923 alone netted each tribal member $12,400.^[6]Bailey, 489.

In 2004, the Osage regained their legal status as a sovereign nation. At the time, their reservation was technically considered to still exist, but a 2010 Federal court decided that it had been dissolved with the Osage Allotment Act of 1906. Today, the Osage Nation has over 13,000 enrolled members with just over half living in Oklahoma. The tribal government is headquartered in Pawhuska, Oklahoma and has jurisdiction in Osage County.^[7]“Osage Nation,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osage_Nation, accessed 16 January 2021.