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  At the meeting, Jefferson addressed the chiefs as “my children” and said, “It is so long since our forefathers came from beyond the great water, that we have lost the memory of it, and seem to have grown out of this land, as you have done….We are all now of one family.” He went on, “On your return tell your people that I take them all by the hand; that I become their father hereafter, that they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.”

  But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River. The Osage chief stated that his people “had no choice, they must either sign the treaty or be declared enemies of the United States.” Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas. And it was in this place where Mollie’s mother and father had come of age.

  Mollie’s father, who was born around 1844, went by his Osage name, Ne-kah-e-se-y. A young Osage man then typically wore fringed buckskin leggings and moccasins and a breechcloth; a finger-woven belt held his tobacco pouch and tomahawk. His chest was often bare, and his head was shaved, except for a strip of hair that ran from the crown to his neck and that stood straight up, like the crest of a Spartan’s helmet.

  Along with other warriors, Ne-kah-e-se-y defended the tribe from attacks, and before heading into battle he would have painted his face black with charcoal and prayed to Wah’Kon-Tah, confirming that it was time, as the Osage put it, “to make the enemy lie reddened on the earth.” As Ne-kah-e-se-y grew older, he became a prominent figure in the tribe. Deliberate and thoughtful, he had an ability to study each situation before choosing a course of action. Years later, when the tribe created its first court system, which adjudicated mostly minor crimes, he was elected one of the three judges.

  Lizzie also grew up on the reservation in Kansas, where she helped to provide for her family, harvesting corn and hauling wood over distances. She wore moccasins, leggings, a cloth skirt, and a blanket around her shoulders, and she painted the part in the middle of her hair red to symbolize the path of the sun. An Indian Affairs agent would later describe her as “industrious” and a “person of good character.”

  Twice a year, when Lizzie and Ne-kah-e-se-y were young, their families and the rest of the tribe would pack their few earthly possessions—clothing, bedding, blankets, utensils, dried meat, weapons—lash them to horses, and set out on a sacred, two-month buffalo hunt. When a scouting party spotted a herd, Ne-kah-e-se-y and the other hunters raced on their horses across the plains, the hooves pounding the earth like drums, the manes whipping the riders’ sweating, gleaming faces. A French medical student, who accompanied the tribe on a hunt in 1840, said, “The race is a merciless one….Once the bison is reached, the animal tries to escape in another direction, he doubles to deceive his enemy; then seeing himself overtaken, he becomes enraged and turns against his aggressor.”

  Ne-kah-e-se-y would coolly draw his bow and arrow, which the Osage considered more effective than a bullet. When a bison was fatally wounded, the medical student recalled, “the beast vomits torrents of blood and falls to its knees before sinking to the ground.” After the tail was cut off—as a trophy for the conqueror—nothing was left to waste: the meat was dried, the heart smoked, the intestines made into sausages. Oils from the bison’s brain were rubbed over the hide, which was then transformed into leather for robes and lodge coverings. And still there was more to reap: horns were turned into spoons, sinews into bowstrings, tallow into fuel for torches. When an Osage chief was asked why he didn’t adopt the white man’s ways, he replied, “I am perfectly content with my condition. The forests and rivers supply all the calls of nature in plenty.”

  The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers. Among them was the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little House on the Prairie based on her experiences. “Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?” Laura asks her mother in one scene.

  “I just don’t like them; and don’t lick your fingers, Laura.”

  “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?”

  One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will soon make the Osage move away: “That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.”

  Though, in the book, the Ingallses leave the reservation under threat of being removed by soldiers, many squatters began to take the land by force. In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

  The Osage searched for a new homeland. They debated purchasing nearly 1.5 million acres from the Cherokee in what was then Indian Territory—a region south of Kansas that had become an end point on the Trail of Tears for many tribes ousted from their lands. The unoccupied area that the Osage were eyeing was bigger than Delaware, but most whites regarded the land as “broken, rocky, sterile, and utterly unfit for cultivation,” as one Indian Affairs agent put it.

  Which is why Wah-Ti-An-Kah, an Osage chief, stood at a council meeting and said, “My people will be happy in this land. White man cannot put iron thing in ground here. White man will not come to this land. There are many hills here…white man does not like country where there are hills, and he will not come.” He went on, “If my people go west where land is like floor of lodge, white man will come to our lodges and say, ‘We want your land.’…Soon land will end and Osages will have no home.”

  So the Osage bought the territory for seventy cents per acre and, in the early 1870s, began their exodus. “The air was filled with cries of the old people, especially the women, who lamented over the graves of their children, which they were about to leave forever,” a witness said. After completing their trek to the new reservation, members of the tribe built several camps, the most significant one being in Pawhuska, where, on a prominent hilltop, the Office of Indian Affairs erected an imposing sandstone building for its field office. Gray Horse, in the western part of the territory, consisted of little more than a cluster of newly built lodges, and it was here where Lizzie and Ne-kah-e-se-y, who married in 1874, settled.

  The series of forced migrations, along with such “white man’s diseases” as smallpox, had taken a tremendous toll on the tribe. By one estimate, its population dwindled to about three thousand—a third of what it had been seventy years earlier. The Indian Affairs agent reported, “This little remnant is all that remains of a heroic race that once held undisputed ownership over all this region.”

   An Osage camp on the new reservation Credit 11

  Although the Osage still went on buffalo hunts, they were chasing not only food but the past. “It was like life in the old days,” a white trader who accompanied them recalled. “The old men of the band were wont to gather about the campfires in a reminiscent mood and there recount the tales of prowess on the war-path and in the chase.”

  By 1877, there were virtually no more American buffalo to hunt—a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words of an army officer, “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” U.S. policy toward the tribes shifted from containment to forced assimilation, and officials increasingly tried to turn the Osage into churchgoing, English-speaking, fully clothed tillers of the soil. The government owed the tribe annuity payments for the sale of its Kansas land but refused to distribute them until able-bodied men like Ne-kah-e-se-y took up farming. And even then the government insisted on making the payments
in the form of clothing and food rations. An Osage chief complained, “We are not dogs that we should be fed like dogs.”

  Unaccustomed to the white man’s agricultural methods and deprived of buffalo, the Osage began to go hungry; their bones soon looked as if they might break through their skin. Many members of the tribe died. An Osage delegation, including the chief Wah-Ti-An-Kah, was urgently dispatched to Washington, D.C., to petition the commissioner of Indian Affairs to abolish the ration system. According to an account by John Joseph Mathews, members of the delegation wore their best blankets and leggings, while Wah-Ti-An-Kah wrapped himself in a red blanket so entirely that you could see little more than his eyes, dark wells that burned with an entire history.

  The delegation went to the commissioner’s office and waited for him. When the commissioner arrived, he informed an interpreter, “Tell these gentlemen that I am sorry that I have another appointment at this time—I am sorry I had forgotten about it until just now.”

   The Osage chief Wah-Ti-An-Kah Credit 12

  As the commissioner tried to leave, Wah-Ti-An-Kah blocked his path to the door and let go of his blanket. To the shock of even his fellow Osage, he was naked, except for his breechcloth and his moccasins, and his face was painted as if he were leading a war party. “He stood there towering like some primitive god of the dark forests,” Mathews wrote.

  Wah-Ti-An-Kah told the interpreter, “Tell this man to sit down.” When the commissioner complied, Wah-Ti-An-Kah said, “We have come [a] long way to talk about this.”

  The commissioner said, “Surely this man who doesn’t know how to act—who comes to my office almost naked, with war paint on his face, is not civilized enough to know how to use money.”

  Wah-Ti-An-Kah said that he was not ashamed of his body, and after he and the delegation pressed their case, the commissioner agreed to end the ration policy. Wah-Ti-An-Kah picked up his blanket and said, “Tell this man it is all right now—he can go.”

  Like many others in the tribe, Mollie’s parents tried to hold on to their customs. Bestowing a name was one of the most important Osage rituals; only then was someone considered a person by the tribe. Mollie, who was born on December 1, 1886, was given the Osage name Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah. Her sisters were also known by Osage names: Anna was Wah-hrah-lum-pah; Minnie, Wah-sha-she; and Rita, Me-se-moie.

  But the process of acculturation was accelerating as settlers began to move onto the reservation. They didn’t look like the Osage, or even like the Cheyenne or the Pawnee. They seemed unwashed and desperate, like William Hale, who would eventually appear on his horse, in his ragged clothes—this man from nowhere. Even settlers like Hale who formed close ties to the Osage argued that the white man’s road was inevitable and that the only way for the Osage to survive was to follow it. Hale was determined to transform not only himself but the wilderness from which he came—to cross-fence the open prairie and to create a network of trading posts and towns.

  In the 1880s, John Florer, a Kansas frontiersman who referred to Osage territory as “God’s country,” established the first trading post in Gray Horse. Mollie’s father, Ne-kah-e-se-y, liked to linger outside it, in the shade, and sell animal pelts, and Mollie got to know the son of a trader, who was one of the first white people she’d ever seen; his skin was as pale as the belly of a fish.

  The trader’s son kept a journal, and in it he noted a profound existential change experienced by Mollie and her family, though he remarked upon it only in passing, as if it were no more than a new item on a ledger. One day, he said, a trader began to refer to Ne-kah-e-se-y as Jimmy. Soon other traders began to call Mollie’s father Jimmy, and before long it had supplanted his Osage name. “Likewise his daughters who often visited the store, received their names there of,” the trader’s son wrote. And that’s how Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah became Mollie.

   John Florer’s trading store in Gray Horse Credit 13

  Mollie—who, like her mother, then wore leggings, moccasins, a skirt, a blouse, and a blanket—slept on the floor in a corner of her family’s lodge and had to do many grueling chores. But there was a relative peacefulness and happiness to that time: Mollie could enjoy the ceremonial dances and the feasts and playing water tag in the creek and watching the men race their ponies in the emerald fields. As the trader’s son wrote, “There lingers memories like a half forgotten dream, of an enchanting world dawning on a child’s consciousness in its wonder and mystery.”

   Mollie’s father (right) in front of Florer’s trading store Credit 14

  In 1894, when Mollie was seven, her parents were informed that they had to enroll her in the St. Louis School, a Catholic boarding institution for girls that had been opened in Pawhuska, which was two days’ journey by wagon to the northeast. An Indian Affairs commissioner had said, “The Indian must conform to the white man’s ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.”

  Mollie’s parents were warned that if they didn’t comply, the government would withhold its annuity payments, leaving the family starving. And so, one morning in March, Mollie was taken from her family and bundled into a horse-drawn wagon. As she and a driver set out toward Pawhuska, in the center of the reservation, Mollie could see Gray Horse, the seeming limit of her universe, gradually disappear until all that was visible was the smoke rising from the tops of the lodges and fading into the sky. In front of her, the prairie stretched to the horizon like an ancient seabed. There were no settlements, no souls. It was as if she’d slipped over the edge of the world and fallen, to borrow Willa Cather’s phrase, “outside man’s jurisdiction.”

  Hour after hour, mile after mile, lurching back and forth in the wagon, Mollie crossed the wild, empty landscape, not yet carved into a country. Eventually, the light began to fail, and the driver and Mollie had to stop and set up camp. When the sun sank below the prairie floor, the sky would turn blood red and then black, the density of the darkness diluted only by the moon and the stars, from where the Osage believed that many of their clans descended. Mollie had become a traveler in the mist. She was surrounded by the forces of night, heard but not seen: the gibbering of coyotes and the howling of wolves and the screaming of owls, which were said to carry an evil spirit.

  The next day, the monochrome prairies gave way to timber-covered hills, and Mollie and her driver rode up and down the slopes, past shadowy blackjacks and sunless caves—perfect places, as an Indian Affairs agent once fretted, “for ambush.” (He added, “Let me tell you there are…ignorant criminals who would do anything.”) They rode until they came upon a sign of human habitation: a single-story, dilapidated, red-painted wooden structure. It was an Osage trading store, and nearby was a grubby rooming house and a blacksmith shop with an immense pile of horseshoes. The muddy trail turned into a wider, even muddier trail, with a scattering of trading stores on either side. These businesses had sagging duckboards out front to help customers avoid the treacherous mud and hitching posts for horses and weather-beaten façades that looked as if they might tumble over in the breeze, some of them with trompe l’oeil second stories to create an illusion of grandeur.

  Mollie had reached Pawhuska. Although the reservation’s capital then seemed a small, squalid place—a “muddy little trading post,” as one visitor described it—it was likely the biggest settlement Mollie had ever seen. She was taken about a mile away, to a forbidding stone building that stood four stories high: the St. Louis Catholic missionary school, where she was left in the care of women in black-and-white habits. Mollie went through the front door—Mathews once described the entrance to another Osage boarding school as a “big, black mouth, bigger and darker than a wildcat’s”—and down a labyrinth of drafty corridors; coal lanterns glowed in the darkness.

  Mollie had to remove the Indian blanket from her shoulders and put on a plain dress. She wasn’t allowed to speak Osage—she had to catch the white man’s tongue—and was given a Bible that began with a distinct notion of the universe: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and t
here was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”

  Each hour of the day was regimented and students were lined up and marched from point to point. They were taught piano, penmanship, geography, and arithmetic, the world distilled into strange new symbols. The instruction was intended to assimilate Mollie into white society and transform her into what the authorities conceived of as the ideal woman. So while Osage boys at other institutions learned farming and carpentry, Mollie was trained in the “domestic arts”: sewing, baking, laundering, and housekeeping. “It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls,” a U.S. government official had stated, adding, “Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?…It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.”

  Many Osage students at Mollie’s school tried to flee, but lawmen chased after them on horseback and bound them with ropes, hauling them back. Mollie attended class eight months each year, and when she did return to Gray Horse, she noticed that more and more girls had stopped wearing their blankets and moccasins and that the young men had exchanged their breechcloths for trousers and their scalp locks for broad-brimmed hats. Many students began to feel embarrassed by their parents, who didn’t understand English and still lived by the old ways. An Osage mother said of her son, “His ears are closed to our talk.”