The Osage Nation and

Jackson County

Today the Jackson County Historical Society recognizes all the land comprising Jackson County was once Osage Nation land. The Osage Nation "People of the Middle Waters" is a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains. The tribe developed in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys around 700 BC along with other groups of its language family. They migrated west after the 17th century, settling near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

The most powerful tribal group in the early history of Missouri was referred to as the Wah-Zha-Zhe, which actually derived from a name for one of its moiety divisions, “The Water People.” The tribal group as a whole originally called themselves Ni-U-Ko’n-Ska, meaning “Children of the Middle Waters.” Later, the Europeans exploring the waterways referred to them as the Osage Indians.

The Osage way of life represented a blending of indigenous cultures that could be identified as characteristic of both Plains and Woodland inhabitants. Males hunted for game and engaged in warfare. It was not uncommon for adults to be well over six feet tall. Men wore their hair in a roach style, shaving their heads except for a scalp lock about two inches high and three inches wide that ran down to the nape of their necks. A male wore a breechcloth, leggings, moccasins, and blanket coverall that he draped over his shoulder. When addressing someone, he lowered the blanket and tied it around his waist.

Once acquired from the Spanish or other tribal groups, the horse became important to the Osage way of life. The Osage name for horse is ka-wa, which translates roughly as “mystery dog” and may have derived from the Kiowa, a tribal group that introduced them to the animal. The Osage secured horses through trading, stealing, and capturing. Riding horses permitted the Osage to travel far and wide. For the Osage, to bring in a horse was an achievement equal to the taking of a scalp from a dead enemy.

The spring hunt began in March and lasted until May, when the Osage began to plant their crops of corn, beans, and pumpkins. Men also hunted in the summer, returning to their villages in late August or early September when women harvested their crops and gathered walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, grapes, papaws, roots, and acorns. Hunting continued in the fall, but hunters remained close to their villages during the cold months of January and February. They wielded bows and arrows, lances, wooden clubs, tomahawks, and knives on the long and short hunts. The bison provided meat, hides, and bones for tools and ornaments. In addition, the deer, elk, bear, wolf, raccoon, fox, wildcat, porcupine, weasel, muskrat, and beaver supplied raw materials for their subsistence economy.

As the Osage households adapted to Missouri’s environment, women maintained the lodges, gathered the firewood, processed the hides, cured the meat, cooked the meals, and reared the children. A female wore a buckskin dress, robe, leggings, and moccasins. Her hair flowed loosely down her back, while she painted the part in her hair red to symbolize the path of the sun across the sky. Mothers placed babies on cradleboards, which tended to flatten their heads. Village lodges were oval with a domed roof and covered with woven cattail mats. Some permanent lodges housing large families were a hundred feet long. Their entrances were positioned to the east, so that the Osage could say prayers to the sun in the morning.

After Europeans began to arrive, their presence produced dramatic changes among the Indians of the Mississippi valley. Disease and dislocation took a terrible toll on peoples such as the Osage, who numbered as many as fifteen thousand at the time of contact. The Osage adapted their economic and political patterns to the new demands of global empires during the eighteenth century. They offered skins, hides, furs, tallow, oil, and food to French traders. Deer leather or “bucks” served as a currency. Another item of commerce was Indian captives or slaves. The Osage acquired metal goods such as knives, awls, hoes, and needles that made their lives easier. Brass kettles replaced Osage pottery, while Osage production of utilitarian objects began to languish. The combination of horses, rum, firearms, and ammunition encouraged Osage households to alter their subsistence economy. Osage communities used their power, strength, and skill to become the dominant brokers between the French in Louisiana and various tribal groups to the north and west.

The Osage had gained power under the jurisdiction of French and Spanish governments, but the US government reorganized the borderlands after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In 1808 William Clark negotiated a treaty with a handful of the Osage, whereby they ceded some two hundred square miles of land between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. In return, the federal government promised to maintain a permanent trading post with a blacksmith shop and mill for the Osage and to give the tribe an annual grant of $1,500. Because of this bargain, Clark later admitted that “if he was to be damned hereafter it would be for making that treaty.” The trading post, Fort Osage, established on a high bluff overlooking the Missouri River in what is now Jackson County, would remain a vital outpost until 1822, except for a brief period when it was abandoned during the War of 1812.

As more settlers poured into the Missouri Territory in the years following the war, the various Indian tribes living there were pressured to relinquish their claims to ancestral lands. Clark, who had become the territorial governor in 1814, took the lead in the arrangements. He persuaded Native delegations to exchange their homeland in Missouri and to relocate farther west to present-day Kansas and Oklahoma.

After statehood, Missourians pressed the US government to remove all Indians from their midst. Treaties in 1818 and 1825 were signed with the Osage, who grudgingly ceded their lands south of the Missouri River in exchange for cash payments and tracts of land out of state. The Osage Trail, which once had facilitated trade with St. Louis, became one of the routes Osage families used for removal to their Kansas reservation. In a final armed confrontation that came to be known as the Osage War, Missouri state militia assaulted hunting parties of Osage, Shawnee, and Delaware in 1837, driving them out of the state.

The Osage were assured that their Kansas reservation would remain their home forever. They numbered some 8,000 in 1850, but their population fell to 3,150 in 1870.

Credit: Brad D. Lookingbill, Professor at Columbia College. Originally posted on https://missouriencyclopedia.org/