Osage Nation

This stone structure was the Osage Agency School in Pawhuska.

From the Osage Nation website:

The Osage, Ponca, Omaha, Kwapa (Quapaw), and Kansa Nations were the descendants of one great tribe of Indians whose first dwelling place was in the region of the Ohio and Wabash rivers. Soon they wandered westward, some going down the Mississippi and some ascending it.

The Omahas, which then included the Osage, Ponca, and Kansa group, ascended the Missouri river, but another separation took place when the Osage and Kansa families settled in the present territory of Missouri and Kansas.

The Osage were once called "Wah-zha-zhe" - the name of a great tribe. The older ancient Osage called themselves the Niukonska which translated to "Little Ones of the Middle Waters".

The Osage were often described as war-like due to the fact that they guarded their land with such ferocity. The ability to obtain firearms at an early date gave the Osage a major advantage in their conflicts with those who intruded upon their lands. The Osage occupied a strategic location between the tribes to the west and the advancing European-American frontier. They were able to control the trade between these tribes and the Europeans until the nineteenth

There were three divisions, the Big Hills, the Little Osages, and the Kaws. The Kaws, who the Osages once refused to acknowledge, drifted away and did not return for a long time. They spoke about the same dialect and could understand each other. The Kaws allotted their lands in 1902, and their people occupied the area northwest of the Osages in Oklahoma Territory.

The Osage were first recorded by Father Jacques Marquette in 1673. He placed them on the Osage River in present-day Vernon County, Missouri, where they were still established nearly 100 years later in 1759.

There is little known about the Osage from this time until the treaty at St. Louis in 1804. Here we find the explorers and French traders marrying into the Osage tribe. Almost from the beginning, trading with the Indians became a lucrative enterprise, for the white man and the spread of trade brought a large number of tribes into contact with the French, Spanish and English. Of whom all groups were trying to create allies among the Indians.

In 1853 the Osages composed seven large villages, besides many smaller ones, along the Neosho and Verdigris rivers, and held sway, at one time, over most of the territory which now composes the states of Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas.

During the treaty of 1894, at St. Louis, it had become apparent that they had in many instances married French traders and explorers, from whom they took the names that distinguishes some of the prominent Osage families of today. Some of these names are: Lessart, Revard, Plomondan, Del Orier, Pappan, Tayrien, Mongranin, Soldani, DeNoya, Fronkier, and Moncravie.