Oct 282014
 

One of the joys of research is a road trip. Working on Damming the Osage took us the length of the Osage River and across areas of Missouri and Kansas that were once the domain of the Osage Indians. Early in September 2009 we explored back roads and small towns in southern Kansas in what was once the Osage Diminished Reserve. The long strip of land along the Kansas-Oklahoma line comprised 4.8 million acres and was the last of Osage holdings after they had ceded millions of acres of Missouri to the westward moving Americans.

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(click photos to enlarge)

There in Montgomery County was the Little House on the Prairie site at County Road 3000 and U.S. Highway 75.

Yes I was one of those legions who read “the little house” books, every single one, and fantasized about being a pioneer kid because it sounded fun and not too dangerous. My recollection of this volume centered on the technology – how Pa ‘swam’ the wagon across the river, built a log cabin or dug a well – and what it must be like to camp on the open, empty prairie, and the sound of a fiddle under the stars. One scene, however, was still etched in memory – the procession of Osages past the Ingalls’ cabin as they began their trek to Indian Territory, Oklahoma.

What I didn’t remember – or more accurately, never knew or understood – was that the Ingalls family was trespassing on the Osage Diminished Reserve. It’s been a long time since I’d read the book, so I picked up a copy to refresh my memory and see what other references there were to the Osages or to “Indians”. There were a lot more than I remembered. Those red tabs mark the references. LHP-2

I also hadn’t retained the fact that Charles Ingalls was aware that they were trespassing on Indian land. According to Ma: “ … the Indians would not be here long. Pa had word from a man in Washington that the Indian Territory would be open to settlement soon. It might already be open to settlement. They could not know, because Washington was so far away.”

The Ingalls family arrived in the summer of 1869 and built their log cabin home on the prairie near Walnut Creek. Pa was one of the more tolerant settlers who felt that the newcomers and the Indians could coexist. He and “the Tall Indian” smoked a pipe together on the hearth of the fireplace in the cabin. Laura recounts one winter in the cabin and more summertime activities. The cabin now on the Ingalls’ homestead site is a recreation based on the description found in the book. The Ingalls’ home was listed as the 89th residence of Rutland Township in the 1870 U.S. Census.

IMG_5129Some time after the dramatic day of departure of the Osages, Pa drove the team and plow to the cabin while talking animatedly to a couple of neighbors: “No Scott!” Pa said. “I’ll not stay here to be taken away by the soldiers like an outlaw! If some blasted politicians in Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have been three miles over the line into Indian Territory. … we’re going now.”

The Osages were paid $1.25 per acre for their land. After buying their own land in Oklahoma from their former enemies the Cherokees, the tribe still had $8.5 million in trust, drawing five percent interest. They held the land in common, until they had to apportion it. Still they maintained community ownership of mineral rights to their land. When huge oil deposits were discovered in Osage County, the tribe became rich.

The Ingalls loaded their covered wagon and headed back to Wisconsin where they still owned property.

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Aug 202014
 

Osage Delegation meets with Pres. Calvin Coolidge(click to enlarge)

Press Photo, 8 x 10, dated January 23, 1924 (by UNITED)

Official caption pasted on the back of photo:

RICHEST INDIANS GREET PRESIDENT.
The delegation of Osage Indians, in the Capital seeking additional allowances from their government held incomes from oil lands, call at the White House and pose with President Coolidge.

Unfortunately the caption does not identify any of the Osages in the photograph. We wonder if the man on the far left is not Chief Bacon Rind (see previous posts: http://www.dammingtheosage.com/osage-chief-bacon-rind/#comment-196 ). We welcome confirmation of that guess or any identification of others in the photo.

Money generated by the sales of drilling rights had made enrolled Osages “probably the wealthiest people on earth” (New York Times November 18, 1898). Since 1897, oil wells have been drilled in Osage County, Oklahoma. With extraordinary foresight, the tribe had reserved subsurface mineral rights even though the land had been allocated among the 2,229 enrolled Osages. . . . . By the 1920s, those Osages who owned headrights, or shares based on their or their ancestors’ listing on the official rolls of 1906 had become rich from oil revenues.” (page 280, Damming The Osage)

Note the peace medals the two Osage men wear. Genuine medals today are quite valuable, but there are a lot of copies. The otter skin ‘bandeaus’ they wear are characteristic Osage head wear.

Feb 212014
 

Osage mother-daughter

Osage mother-daughter photo caption

Press Photo by Wide World Photos, 1924

Caption reads: Mother clings to Indian Custom, but Daughter … much American: The wife and daughter of Red Eagle, Principal Chief of the Osage Tribe, in Washington to adjust some finances with the Interior Department. The daughter, Mary, prefers the American fashion while mother clings faithfully to the Osage tribal robes.

Possibly Chief Red Eagle is Paul Red Eagle who was Chief from 1923-24, following Chief Ne-Kah-Wah-She-Tun-Kah’ who died while in office.

Since the 1890s the Osage tribe had had substantial income derived from the sale of drilling rights to oil discovered on their lands.  “With extraordinary foresight, the tribe had reserved subsurface mineral rights even though the land had been allocated among the 2,229 enrolled Osages.” (page 280, Damming the Osage).

Money generated by the sales of drilling rights made enrolled Osages “probably the wealthiest people on earth” (New York Times November 18, 1898). Having had great wealth and the advantages of wealth – many Osages traveled the world and pursued higher education, modern houses, fashion, and automobiles; others maintained their Osage cultural lifestyle, language and traditions. One who maintained the cultural lifestyle was Paul Red Eagle.

Six years after this photo was taken, Chief Red Eagle died. John Joseph Mathews, author of many books and articles on the Osages, attended his funeral and wrote a moving and graphic account of the final rites for the venerable warrior/chief.  In “Passing of Red Eagle” (Sooner Magazine, Feb. 1930), Mathews remembers:

For ninety years Red Eagle had lived among his people. For that many years of constant changes, contacts and shifting scenes, he remained an Indian; thinking Indian thoughts and dreaming his own dreams.  In his later years he seemed to be waiting for something. He lived quietly on this ranch preferring his horse to a car until his eightieth year. He had oil royalties but desired to live in simplicity. He had seen many things and had taken part in the wars in the southern part of the state; he talked of these wars with members of the tribe. He saw brick buildings rise up among the jack-oaks and his nation spanned with roads, some of them sinuous black ribbons winding over sandstone ridges and limestone prairie. He watched with passivity, shiny oil derricks spring up like phantasmal fungi from valleys, wooded hills and prairie. Yet, with him remained the spirit of his fathers.  To the end he remained an Indian. Frenzied wealth seeking and confused material progress did not disturb the soul of Red Eagle.

A Catholic priest presided at the funeral, but after the sermon and prayers, the son of Red Eagle and his wife came forward “and began the heart tearing wail of the race. No suffering European could so touch the deepest chords of one’s heart as does the long, quavering cry of a mourning Osage.”

 

 

 

 

 

Nov 272013
 

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Real Photo Postcard, 1917

Written in ink on the back: “Genva McQuain. Lewis Redeagle, Willie Bigheart. Osage Indians. Friends of mine at O.I.S. 1917” These handsome young scholars attended O.I.S. (the Osage Indian Government School (1912-1953) in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

The first federal government sponsored school to educate and civilize the Osages was Harmony Mission in Bates County Missouri, 1821 – established at the request of the tribe and implemented by Protestant missionaries. During its existence the school did not make many Christians or turn warriors into agriculturists, but even the old buffalo hunting Osages were interested in having their children educated.

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Nov 052013
 

For our presentations this month for the Greenway Network at River Soundings and for the Big Muddy Speaker Series in St. Charles, we created this chronology of development on the Osage River.

DAMMING THE OSAGE:
A Chronology of Development on the Osage River and Tributaries

• 1813 – The Osages and Chouteaus reluctantly agreed to locate the trading post on the Missouri River instead of on the Osage, near their home, acknowledging that the Osage was too shallow for year round transportation.
• 1821 – Harmony Mission attempted a water mill on the Marais des Cygnes (then called the Osage River) but it washed out.
• 19th century – numerous pioneer mills on tributaries throughout the 1800s
• Circa 1840s – Caplinger Mills – successful grist mill on the Sac River. In 1917 this became the first hydroelectric project on the Osage system
• 1895 – Lock & Dam No. 1 construction started because of agitation for river improvement for steamboats. Designed by Hiram Chittenden, built by Army Corps of Engineers.
• 1906 Bates County Ditch, an ill-conceived channelization of the Marais des Cygnes
• Late 1920s – run-of-the-river hydroelectric dam at Osceola built by Ozark Utility Company
• 1931 Bagnell Dam closed. Financed by Union Electric of St. Louis, but started by Walter Cravens and Ralph Street of Kansas City.
• 1932 – Corps of Engineers delivers 308 Report on “Osage River, Mo. And Kans.”

Corps of Engineers Dams completed 1961-1982

• 1961 – POMME DE TERRE, on the Pomme de Terre River – multipurpose pool of 7,820 acres
• 1963 – POMONA, KANSAS, on Dragoon and One Hundred Ten Mile creeks – 4,060 acres
• 1969 – STOCKTON DAM, MISSOURI, on Sac River – 24,900 acres. Stockton is larger than the first two projects and is the only one, besides Truman, to have hydropower generation
• 1975 – MELVERN LAKE, KANSAS, on the Marais des Cygnes – 6,930 acres
• 1979 – TRUMAN DAM, WARSAW MISSOURI on the Osage River – 55,600 acre power pool
• 1982 – HILLSDALE, KANSAS, on Big Bull Creek – 4,580 acres

• ? – Removal of Lock & Dam No. 1. Originally unjustified and an environmental disaster today

More information is available in DAMMING THE OSAGE: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir. Retail $35, it is available from our website for $25 postage paid.

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Dec 052012
 

Real photo postcard, probably 1940s

Lovers Leap was a cliff near Linn Creek, about which J. W. Vincent, editor of the local paper, penned a fanciful tale of a suicidal India maiden.  Virtually every declivity more than 25 feet high in the Mississippi River valley had a similar legend attached to it. When Lake of the Ozarks filled in 1931, the name stayed but the jump got shorter and the landing in water became more survivable. The little creature poised on the rocks in disregard of its safety appears to be some species of dog.


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Oct 142012
 

The Osage River runs a course of about 500 miles from the Flint Hills of north central Kansas to Bonnot’s Mill in central Missouri where it joins the Missouri River. A fecundate prairie stream that cuts into the Ozark uplift in mid-Missouri, the Osage is rich with human history.  One little remembered piece of history involves the site selection for the state’s capitol of governance.

Why is Jefferson City, a modest town in central part of the state on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, the capitol of Missouri? Why not a larger, more commercial, more populated urban setting?

Steel engraving of Missouri’s second capitol from an 1852 Meyers’ Universum, published in Germany. (and page 292, Damming the Osage)

The answer to that question is found in the 1820 constitution of the soon-to-be-state of Missouri.  At that time, rivers were the highways of the frontier—rutted lanes were the closest thing to a surface road and they were scarce; railroads were not even a gleam in a developer’s eye.  Waterways carried the freight and passengers pushing west.  Rivers were “…common highways, and forever free to the citizens of this state and of the United States, without any tax, duty, impost, or toll, therefor, imposed by the state.”

The Mississippi and Missouri were the continental pathways; the tributary Osage carried fur traders to their Indian suppliers, and later carried steamboats with settlers and supplies to communities established along its banks. Under Article X, “Of the Permanent Seat of Government”, the General Assembly was directed to name five commissioners from different part of the state to select a site for the state capitol. The primary limitation for selection was “that no place shall be selected which is not situated on the bank of the Missouri river, and within forty miles of the mouth of the river Osage.”

US Highways 63 and 54 cross the Missouri River at Jefferson City, just west of the capitol.
First railroads, then highways co-opted commercial river transportation.

The Osage at times runs a large quantity of water. Its access to western Missouri would have made it a good conduit not only to western Missouri and eastern Kansas, but an avenue to a jumping-off place for overland travel to Santa Fe and the southwest.

Missouri’s capitol, named for Thomas Jefferson, only 18 (more or less) miles from the original mouth of the Osage, was incorporated in 1821.

Although the Osage Indians and French fur traders and early American officials knew it was seasonally unreliable for boat travel (from canoes to steamboats), business interests ignored its hydrologic realities and pushed for river improvements. Before the Corps of Engineers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on multipurpose dams of questionable usefulness in the Osage valley, they wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on “improving” the Osage for steamboat travel.

 

Oct 042012
 

Phyllis Stewart of the Papinville Historical and Cemetery Association explains the history and significance of Harmony Mission to the crowd.

The Papinville, Missouri, Historical Association held its annual picnic this year on the first day of autumn. This afforded the rare opportunity to tour the site of  Harmony Mission on the banks of the Marais des Cygnes in Bates County.  The first Indian mission in Missouri was established in response to a request  by the Osage Indians to the President that a school be built  and the missionaries and families arrived in 1821. The mission was located next to the “Great Village” of the Osage Indians on the Marais Des Cygnes River. The site is now on private land, but for this day the owner allowed visitors.  A small ‘train’ of horse drawn and motorized wagons drove through the pastures and pecan groves to the site.

Chief Jack Arthur Whitehorn of the Missouriah-Osage tribes spoke at the museum about Osage history in Missouri. Other activities on the grounds of the museum included, live music, cake walks, a pie auction and picnic. The Association reported they are “singing a happy song due to the great success of the 21st Annual Papinville Picnic.”


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Dec 032011
 
We are interested in things, the common denominator of which is the Osage River – for 35 + years exploring prairies, small towns, the Ozark-prairie border, doing some snake hunting in the middle part. Leland has fished the lower Osage since he was a child.That the river and its denizens had literary potential was not initially obvious. Leland’s father was an engineer for the state of Missouri, inspecting the water systems of small towns. Some days, young Leland would join him on his visits. He’d let the boy out to explore while he made his rounds. At Osceola one day, Leland got a Coke at the café by the low dam on the Osage and wandered down to the river. He found the carcass of a huge catfish, 5 feet long, floating belly up at the base of the dam.  
The next year he read Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea when Life magazine ran it as a series. In the end scene tourists look at the carcass of the great marlin and misunderstand the explanation of a local who says ‘sharks’ – meaning that’s what killed the marlin. They take his words to mean that the carcass is a shark. Flashback to the big, dead catfish. The Osage River became a literary river then – associated with words and stories. It was more literary than the clearer, scenic, Ozark rivers, which are art rivers, visual places, with smaller literary components. The Osage River is murky, with a more Shakespearian history, a more robust historical aspect. Clear rivers are rightly called scenic. Nature is more dominant there. Nothing like paddlefish or big blue catfish there. More artistic.We started on The Osage River: paddlefish, prairies, farms & villages, dams & reservoirs, imperial Indians, explorers, slickers, sportsmen, tourists & various violent, litigious & noteworthy events in the history of the Osage River Valley and at about the 500th page realized  it  had gone beyond affordable as we wanted an all color book to sell for less than $100.  It was our own form of cultural geography, an exploration of life along the river through generations, with a vaguely Carl Sandburg-1920’s-1930’s-Americana feel to it. We knew we didn’t want it to resemble William Least Heat Moon’s mooney stuff.We also realized that the real untold story is the machinations behind the building of Lake of the Ozarks and Bagnell Dam and Truman Dam and Reservoir. These are water resource crimes and misdemeanors on the order of Polanski’s Chinatown.  Lots of bitter court battles; two of three of the most important developers of Lake of the Ozarks went to federal prison; Environmental Defense Fund’s 1972 lawsuit against Truman Dam took years, was very contentious and has mysteriously disappeared from public record.

Mug shot of Walter Cravens, President of the Land Bank of Kansas City. Cravens was the prime mover behind the development of Bagnell Dam and Lake of the Ozarks in the mid-1920s. He served time in Leavenworth for financial shenanigans that included his efforts to swap Osage Valley farms for bankrupt, dusty Kansas farms (on which his bank held the paper).
No mug shot available for Louis Egan, high-flying president of Union Electric during the construction of Bagnell Dam, who would up in a federal facility in Florida.
We’ve left in a considerable amount on the imperial Osage Indians whose military power, some think, altered the development history of the central United States. And we’ve kept iconic crumbling small towns that pepper the prairie watershed of western Missouri and eastern Kansas.Previous to the dam-building era (the serious, high dams) of the 1920s, numerous efforts were made to improve steamboat travel by planning a series of locks and dams (only one of which was built).
Lock and Dam #1 about 20 miles up the Osage from its confluence with the Missouri River
More than 150 years of efforts to develop the river industrially that were unrealistic, sometimes criminally motivated, with lots of corruption and sloppy engineering have rarely produced the utopian benefits promised in whatever era.  Dammed as it is, resilient American culture on the lakes, tributaries, and watershed of the Osage is still interesting and Twainian in its vigor, variety.We’re ending up with 304 pages, 600 color illustrations (maps, old and new photographs).  Hope to send it to the printer in late spring; hope to send it to bookstores in fall, 2012; $35 retail – a huge bargain for such a book.