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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.”
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?”
“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.”
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.”
An Indian Affairs commissioner had said, “The Indian must conform to the white man’s ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.”
Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indians into private-property owners—a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.
What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow.
