Dictionary:

Osage

  (ō'sāj', ō-sāj')

1. 1. A Native American people formerly inhabiting western Missouri and later southeast Kansas, with a present-day population in north-central Oklahoma. Substantial oil reserves were discovered on Osage lands in the early 20th century.
   2. A member of this people.
2. The Siouan language of the Osage.

[French, from Osage wazházhe, tribal name.]

For more information on Osage, visit Britannica.com.

Originally part of a large Dhegian-Siouxan speaking body of Indians, the Osages lived on the lower Ohio River. Attacks from aggressive tribes to the east drove the group west of the Mississippi River in the early seventeenth century. By about 1650, the Dhegians comprised five autonomous tribes: Quapaws, Kansas, Omahas, Poncas, and Osages. The Osages inhabited a region that straddled the plains and the woodlands of western Missouri. Culturally adaptable, the Osages kept old practices when useful, and adopted new ones when necessary. Osage women continued to plant crops in the spring, but men increasingly hunted deer and buffalo commercially on the plains during summer and fall.

The Osages organized themselves into two patrilineal groupings, or moieties, one symbolizing the sky and peace, the other focusing on the earth and war. Each moiety originally had seven, and later twelve, clans. Some clans had animal names, and some were named after natural phenomena or plants. Villages had two hereditary chiefs, one from each moiety. Osage parents arranged their children's marriages, with the bride and groom always from opposite moieties, and the new couple lived in the lodge of the groom's father. Over time, however, the custom changed, and the couple would live with the bride's family. The Osages believed in an all-powerful life force Wa-kon-da and prayed at dawn each day for its support. Religious ceremonies required the participation of all clans.

The French made contact with the Osages in 1673 and began trading, particularly in guns. The Osages needed firearms to fend off attacks from old enemies like the Sauks, Fox, Potawatomis, Kickapoos, and Illinois, and put great energy into commercial hunting and trading livestock and slaves in order to buy them. Further, they used their geographic location to block tribes to the west, the Wichitas, Kansas, Pawnees, Caddos, and Quapaws, from joining the arms race. The Osage were able to control the region between the Missouri and Red Rivers through their superior firepower and great numbers—for much of the eighteenth century, the Osages could muster about one thousand warriors.

By the eighteenth century, the tribe had split into three bands: the Little Osages along the Missouri River, the Arkansas along the Verdigris River, and the Great Osages on the upper Osage River. By the 1830s, there were at least five bands. American expansion in the early nineteenth century moved more than sixty thousand already displaced eastern Indians (Chickasaws, Cherokees, Delawares, and others) west of the Mississippi, overrunning the Osages. In 1839, a treaty with the U.S. government forced the Osages to remove to Kansas. Wisely, the Osages made peace with the Comanches and Kiowas and leapt into the prosperous trade in buffalo hides.

White settlers, especially after the Homestead Act of 1862, encroached on Osage lands, and, by 1870, the tribe had ceded its remaining territory in Kansas. Proceeds from the sale of Osage lands went into a government trust fund and the purchase of a 1.5 million acre reservation from the Cherokees in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma). The decades after 1870 saw the dissolution of the old political forms; pressure from "civilizing" missionaries; and increased tension between full-blooded and mixed-blood Osages. The Osage Allotment Act of 1906 divided oil revenues from their Oklahoma fields among the 2,229 members of the tribe, with the provision that no new headrights be issued. Oil revenues peaked at about $31,000 per headright in 1981. The 1990 census showed 9,527 people who identified themselves as Osage.

Bibliography

Rollings, Willard H. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

Sturtevant, William C., and Raymond J. DeMallie, eds. Handbook of North American Indians: Plains. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001.

The Osage Nation, a Native American tribe in the United States, is the source of most other terms containing the word "osage".

Osage can also refer to:

• Osage-orange, Maclura pomifera, a tree of the mulberry family
• Osage Indian murders (1921-1923), a group of murders investigated and solved by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation that took place on the Osage Indian Reservation
• Osage River, a tributary of the Missouri River, entirely contained in Missouri, United States
• The TH-55 Osage U.S. Army helicopter
• USS Osage (1863)
• USS Osage (LSV-3)

Osage is a part of many placenames in the United States, including:

• Osage, Iowa
• Osage, Oklahoma (also known as Osage City, Oklahoma)
• Osage, West Virginia (near Morgantown, West Virginia)
• Osage, Wyoming
• Osage Beach, Missouri
• Osage City, Kansas
• Osage County, Kansas
• Osage County, Missouri
• Osage County, Oklahoma
• Osage Hills State Park
• Osage Indian Reservation (*Redirect)
• Osage State Fishing Lake
• Osage Street in Coon Rapids, Minnesota
• Osage Township, LaSalle County, Illinois
• Osage Township, Minnesota
• Femme Osage (Missouri), location where Daniel Boone settled in 1799
• Fort Osage (Independence, Missouri), a United States Army base built in 1808

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