In the 1990s an editor at The Washington Post, the Osage journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr., researched his family history and discovered that it wasn’t the whites who had been pushed off the land, but the Osages. Pa’s neighbors, and perhaps Pa himself, had driven them out by stealing their food, killing their livestock, burning their houses, robbing their graves, and murdering them outright. “The question will suggest itself,” wrote an aghast federal agent who witnessed it all: “Which of these people are the savages?”
