The Osage Empire Before Oil

In the Osage world, every child was born into one half of creation. The Tzi-Sho, the sky people, held the sun, the moon, the stars and the summer thunder. The Hun-Kah, the earth people, held the rivers, the grasses and the four-legged. The two halves leaned on each other like the poles of a lodge, and over them the Little Old Men kept the sacred bundles, the pipe and the long memory of a people who called themselves the Children of the Middle Waters.

Their country lay between the Missouri and the Arkansas, where prairie met timber, and for generations they held it against rivals and bargained with empires. Between the French canoes of 1673 and the Louisiana Purchase, Osage war parties and traders dominated the Arkansas valley, and France, Spain and Britain each courted and feared them.

Then came the Americans. The treaty at Fort Osage in 1808 gave up most of what is now Missouri and northern Arkansas, the removal of 1825 pushed the nation onto a reservation in Kansas, and the Civil War split it. In the early 1870s the Osage sold their Kansas lands and bought a new reservation from the Cherokee in Indian Territory, stony hill country no settler wanted. Allotment came in 1906, when the nation divided its surface land among its members but kept everything beneath it in common. No one yet knew how much oil that was.