The Native Ground by Kathleen DuVal

Author:Kathleen DuVal [DuVal, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Indigenous Peoples of the Americas
ISBN: 9780812201826
Google: CzzqFFfnV8EC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-06-03T01:41:14+00:00

Figure 10. Pawhuska, by Charles Evret de Saint-Memin. Pawhuska was Great Chief of the Osages by 1800. Saint-Memin probably painted this portrait during the Osage visit to Washington in 1806. Courtesy New-York Historical Society.

By 1805, the Osages were clashing with these Indians from the East and Arikaras, Kansas, Pawnees, Otos, and possibly even Missouris to the west. While native Caddos and immigrant Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Choctaws occasionally struck Osages on the Arkansas River, the brunt of war fell on the Osages who lived in the north, near the Missouri and Osage rivers. The United States and the Osages had a common interest in restoring peace. In September 1805, twenty Great and Little Osage chiefs from the towns near the Missouri River made a peace treaty with the Delawares, Miamis, Potawatomis, Kickapoos, Sauks, Foxes, Kaskaskias, Iowas, and the Des Moines River Sioux in which they agreed to settle their disputes through mediation by the United States rather than through violence. The United States adopted European precedents by promising presents, protection from anyone who violated the treaty, and steady trade.70

The Osages held the United States responsible for its promises of protection and friendship. In late 1805, a Potawatomi party attacked a Little Osage hunting camp south of the Missouri River, while the hunters were away. They killed more than thirty women and children and captured about sixty others. Soon thereafter, two Little Osage chiefs appeared before Governor Wilkinson with their heads bowed, their eyes filled with tears, their faces smeared with mud, their clothing rent, and their American medals in their hands. They told the governor that they had not expected to need to guard their families closely because the president had promised that they would be safe, “yet have Red Men spilt our Blood, destroyed our flesh, & carried our Wives, & Children into Captivity there to treat them like Beasts.”71 Surely this was the time for the United States to prove its friendship by redeeming the captives. The Potawatomis had passed most of them on to Kickapoos, Sauks, and Foxes, and the Osages would have had great difficulty in recovering them. While Osage warriors had more power in the mid-continent than did the United States Army, they recognized the wide reach of the federal government's influence. As one Osage man, whose family was among the captives, flattered Secretary Dearborn: “your voice is a well known sound, which reaches thro’ every forest, and is obeyed by the Red People however hostile to each other, and where ever dispersed over this extended country.”72

Fulfilling the treaty obligation did not come cheap. United States officials ransomed 46 Osage captives, paying as much as $150 each. In addition, the government gave the Osages $500 in goods to discourage revenge and spent over $10,000 on expenses for another Osage trip to Washington. In the summer of 1806, Zebulon Pike ascended the Missouri River to the Osage villages with the ransomed prisoners and the returning delegation from Washington. In the formal ceremony celebrating the captives’ return,

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