The Osage Indians

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Background
Marriage and Children
Jobs
Clothing


Background

       At the time of Lewis and Clark's expedition, the Osage Indians lived in what are now parts of Missouri, northern Arkansas and eastern Kansas. They called themselves the "Little Ones," or Wa-saw-see, and are one of five branches of the Omaha Sioux who were forced west from their previous home on the lower Ohio River by white settlement in the east. They were divided into three clans: the Great Osage, Little Osage, and Arkansa Osage. In their flourishing times they were mainly farmers, living in small towns and cities, and each clan controlled its part of the town. They were also one of the Indian groups that built mounds. Their first experience with Euro-Americans came in 1673 when Jacques Marquette, a Frenchman, encountered them. When the Spanish arrived in that part of North America they refused to trade with the Osage in an attempt to prevent them from raiding smaller, weaker Indian groups by denying them ammunition, but the French, English, and Americans were more than happy to trade. They got along especially well with the French, with whom they traded with for guns, ammunition, and axes to use against their enemies. They were known for being fierce warriors and for controlling trade. However, diseases such as cholera and smallpox weakened them and made them powerless to ward off the white settlers encroaching on their land. "Even before [their remaining land] could be sold, American settlers began moving onto it illegally, claiming squatter's rights," (Native Americans.) The U.S. government eventually forced them to cede 100 million acres for just $166,300 in livestock and horses. They were 17,000 strong in the late 1600's, but by 1871 there were only 3000 left, and today the Osage Nation is based in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.


This is a map from 1862 of Missouri and Kansas. The Osage inhabited southern Missouri, eastern Kansas, and northern Arkansas, right below Missouri.


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Marriage and Children

    Osage girls married immediately upon reaching puberty, unlike boys, who married in their late teens. When the oldest daughter in a family married, her husband also got marriage rights to all of her younger sisters if he so chose. However, this did not happen often; polygamy was rare. The groom's parents would choose a girl for their son from a different clan, and four men called "good men," generally close friends of the groom, were asked to determine what gifts should be exchanged between the uniting families (Furman). Wedding ceremonies were simple. It was originally the tradition for newlyweds to move in with the groom's parents, but this custom changed to living with the bride's parents. This was because raiding became more frequent when the whites arrived and when one clan went on a raid, there would still be a man of a different clan left to protect the home if the bride and groom were with the bride's family. This increase in raiding was a result of the Osage changing from being agricultural to semi-nomadic hunting people at the whites' influence (Furman).
If a woman was widowed or divorced, she was an outcast and seen as only fit for a white man.
When a baby was born, the town would have a naming ceremony to make it a "real" person. As the children grew up, girls were educated mainly by their mothers in domestic arts, horticulture, and gathering (Kansas City Museum).

     Osage women did not have to marry Indian men. Occasionally women married men of different tribes, such as the neighboring Omaha and Pawnee, but these marriages were rare and usually political rather than romantic (Thorne, 160). Interracial marriages between Indian women and white men were much more common, starting in the late 1700's. There are no records of Indian men marrying white women (Furman). There were many French Catholic men employed as traders living in nearby cities, such as St. Louis. Indian women sought them out because they thought the wives' of whites would be wealthier, better dressed, and would not have to work as hard. Tanis C. Thorne, in his book The Many Hands of My Relations , claims that, "There was a wide range of experiences for mixed couples," (160). They ranged from being casually married in an Indian ceremony and not seeing much of each other, to being married under the Catholic Church and living together. More often however, the marriages were "diplomatic" but did not "unite." They functioned to facilitate trade interests. They were likely not enduring marriages out of love, and most did not last until death (53).
     Children with Indian mothers and white fathers were called Metis, and they lived in both their two worlds. If their parents were married but not living together, or if they were not married but their father was still around, they would spend part of their time in their mother's village and part of their time in town with their father. If their parents lived together it was in a predominantly white town. Thorne claims that "Documented cases of mixes-blood children being raised exclusively by their Indian kin is relatively rare. To move back and forth between Indian and French relatives, as many of the French-Osages appear to have done, was a surprisingly common childhood experience for many biracial persons…." (167). Bilingualism was encouraged, and Metis became important diplomats in trading as they grew up. Fathers would have their children baptized in the Catholic Church and if they could afford it, they would pay for an official education for their kids. These Catholicized children were more likely to marry whites than Indians when they grew up.However, it was quite normal for these children to feel at home in both cultures and rather than being shunned for not being one or the other, they were accepted and helpful to both.As more Metis children were born, they grew into their own community in the Missouri area.

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Jobs    

    For hundreds of years the Osage were an agricultural society living in woodlands. Families lived in towns or cities, in lodges made of wood and reeds, or of tall poles covered with animal hides. The lodges were thirty to forty feet in length and were the center of family life (Kansas City Museum). They were permanent and the Osage only left them twice a year, once in the summer and once in the fall, when they headed west to hunt buffalo. The main job of women in the towns was to grow certain crops and gather food, as well as raise children and take care of the home. They grew maize, squash, pumpkins, gourds, and beans, as well as gathering wild fruit, berries, acorns, and nuts (Kansas City Museum). In autumn they would harvest the crops and preserve them for winter. On hunting trips, women were in charge of tanning the hides of animals their husbands killed, and they were particularly noted for their tanning skills (Pritzker). As little girls grew up they were educated in these tasks by their mothers, and learned through observation. Grandmothers were responsible for the moral education of their granddaughters.

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Clothing
     The clothing that Osage women wore was simple. Older women wore a one-shouldered tunic and younger ones wore shirts like men did, except more brightly colored. They also wore wrap skirts dyed either blue or scarlet red (Historic.) They were made of deerskin, usually taking two skins to complete a whole outfit. As described by Gudmund Hatt in 1914, the shirt consisted of "…a piece of cloth or skin with a hole in the middle for the head… resting upon both shoulders and covering the breasts and back." Their skirts were usually no more than knee length and were sometimes decorated with fringes at the bottom. With such mild weather, there was no need for very warm clothing. In George Catlan's book Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions , he tells of the Osage rejecting Euro-American clothing in favor of their traditional skin garments. He sketched a portrait of an Osage wife of a chief holding her baby, and said that she was the exception; she was the one woman who wore anything made by whites. "She was richly dressed in costly cloths of civilized manufacture which is almost a solitary instance among the Osages…." The woman has long, dark, wavy hair that blows in the wind and she sits on a rock, leaning a little bit back as the naked baby in her arms squirms and grabs her necklace. She has a cloth dress, made of European fabric and skins but in the Indian style of a tunic like the older women wore; it is wrapped around her, hanging off her back to the ground. Moccasins cover her feet. Catlin also says that the women were richly adorned, wearing silver bands on their wrists and rings on their fingers. They would cut and slit their ears and decorate them with ornaments made of tinsel and beads. Buckskin dresses were not brought to the Osage until the 1890's, when the idea reached them from the Northern Plains. The dress is the stereotypical Indian garment, but shirts and skirts were still favored by most Osage women. They were the traditional way to dress and they took less skins to complete; dresses require three rather than two. Children did not wear very many clothes until they turned ten, and then little girls dressed just as their mothers did.

This is the picture of the wife of the Osage chief that Catlin painted.
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Traditions and Customs
     Osage men did not treat women as their equals, but women did have some privileges. Men allowed them to join secret religious societies alongside them, where the qualifications were to undergo special ceremonies. There were also ceremonies in all seasons for naming, mourning, peace, planning, and harvesting, where women could dance in the rituals, but not sing (Hirschfelder). They were more accessories to the celebration rather than full participants. Even today, women usually do not partake in tribal political office (Levinson). The only people who were priests were men, and they held all the authority over rituals.
     Women commonly got tattoos, especially to remember their husbands by if their husbands were killed. If a man committed a notable act of bravery he earned the right to tattoo his wife and daughters (Pritzker).
     Mothers taught their children well-defined rules of behavior. They raised their kids gently, disciplining them using ridicule and rewards, never physical punishment. Osage women carried their babies on boards on their backs, because it was convenient. As a result of this the babies' heads were flattened in the back and stayed that was for life.Whites who observed this, such as George Catlan, claimed that this was quite uncomfortable for the infants but Indians claim that this is not so. This is a possible cultural misinterpretation that occurred between Indians and the first whites.

This is a photograph of a sculpture in North Dakota commemorating Sacagawea.
On her back she wears a cradleboard with a baby in it like an Osage woman would have worn.

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Treatment by Men
    When white men visited Indian towns, they often saw women hard at work in the fields and concluded that they were basically slaves of drudgery to the men. This inference was not always accurate and probably came from the fact that historically in white culture, agriculture was "man's work" and seen as too difficult for women to perform. To see a woman planting or harvesting must have seemed like obscene mistreatment. Osage women, though, were generally treated decently by Osage men; however, this was not always the case with white men.
     Thorne claims that due to political and demographic shifts after the war of 1812, the Osage and the French traders, mainly in St. Louis, were pushed into living close together (246) and this naturally led to increased relations. Most Indians tended to be interested in sexual relations with white traders in the area. This interest stemmed from three purposes: to obtain European goods, to be good hosts, and just plain physical attraction. The influx of traders lowered the value that the Osage put on sex. "Sexual experiences, like all intimate encounters, may mean very different things to persons of dissimilar cultures," claims Ronda in Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (62). The whites' attitudes about sex with Indian women influenced the Indians to feel the same way and it became less of a romantic act and more of a way to form relations. In this way women played an important role by expanding the economy through forming alliances (Ronda, 208). Also, sex was seen as a way of exchanging spiritual power. Whites were very powerful over the Indians so sex with them was seen as giving the Indians power also (208). Villages on the lower Missouri did not value "virtue" in their women as much as villages on the upper Missouri (Ronda, 166), so women who did sleep with traders were not frowned upon, but rather encouraged.
     "Without question, there was a sexual license at the lower Missouri trading posts… Multiple unions of both men and women can be interpreted as clear indicators of the breakdown of the strict moral codes of both the central Siouans [this includes the Osage] and the French Catholics," Thorne claims (160.) Occasionally these alliances ended in marriage, but that was often not the case.Many unmarried Indian women had Metis children by themselves. Even if marriages were performed, they were generally Indian ceremonies and therefore not recognized in the Catholic Church; the French men did not always see them as legitimate. It was also common for traders to have multiple Indian wives, or even for Indian women to have multiple husbands. These were relationships of convenience for economic benefit, not affection.

     Osage women also were sometimes stolen and sold as slaves. When raids were performed by men of different tribes, the enemy would try to kill the men they found but not the women or children. "…throughout most of the historic period of intertribal warfare," Catlin writes, "…Indian women had more reason to fear being taken captive than being killed." This is the way it was for women belonging to many different tribes of this time (see the section on Sacagawea's life.) They stole women and used them as pawns in intertribal trade, selling them to become slaves, wives, or even to be assimilated into their new tribe. They would be exchanged for goods from town to town, making their way from west to east, and sometimes would even be offered in trade to white traders. There are records of wealthy St. Louis families having Indian women as slaves in the 1770's, such as the Chouteau-Laclede family, who had two Indian women slaves in addition to black slaves (Thorne, 75.) The Spanish, when they owned the Louisiana Purchase area, encouraged slave-holding because it aided the economy of the area to have extra, unpaid workers in the fields.Slave-holding waned in the early 1800's as the population of St. Louis grew and slavery became more of an issue in the United States.
     The Osage themselves also occasionally held slaves. George Catlin painted a picture of a girl the Osage captured and held. In fact, there were many raids to capture slaves and an active slave trade between Indian groups in the 1600's and 1700's especially (Thorne 26.)


This is a portrait of a girl held as a slave by the Osage. She eventually escaped.

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