While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The exact date of the settlement of the Great Osages
in this village on the Neosho is not known. It was about 1815, as said
before. Colonel Sibley, writing in October, 1820, says it was “Six or
eight years ago.” The Little Osages must have settled on the Neosho, in
the great bottom about the present town of Chanute. Or they may have been
on the east bank of the Neosho, opposite the town of the Great Osages. The
Little Osages on the Ncosho were more numerous than the Great Osages. In
their three towns there were about one thousand souls, including some
twenty families of Missouris, intermarried with them.
The missionaries came down
from their establishments in the old Osage country to proclaim the Gospel
to Osages on the Neosho. The Presbyterians set up a mission there as early
as 1824, with Rev. Benson Pixley in charge. What this effort accomplished
is not fully known. In March, 1830, Rev. Nathaniel B. Dodge, was sent from
Independence, Mo., where he had gone after strenuous labors at Harmony
Mission, to take up the work with the Osages, on the Neosho. There he
established what was known as the “Boudinot” Mission. It was on the east
bank of the river opposite the town of White Hair. He remained at that
charge until 1835, when he returned to the Little Osage River, in Vernon
County, Mo., settling near Balltown, where he died in 1848. His departure
from the Neosho was the end of the Presbyterian Mission there.
The Baptists made no efforts to establish a mission
among the Osages on the Neosho. McCoy says the Osages were much to be
pitied at that time, but does not explain why the Baptists were unable to
help them.
The Roman Catholic Mission was founded at the point
where the town of Osage Mission was afterwards located. The town was the
result of the mission. In 1822 the Bishop of New Orleans appointed Rev.
Father Charles de La Croix missionary to the Osages on the Neosho. He reached the
field of his labors in May of that year. On the 5th of that month he
baptized Antone Chouteau, who was born in 1817, and whose baptism is the
first recorded in Kansas. This missionary succumbed to the hardships of
pioneer life, dying at St. Louis. He was succeeded by Rev. Charles Van
Quickenborn, who appeared on the Neosho in 1827. In 1828 he performed the
ceremony of marriage between Francis D. Agbeau, a half-breed, and an Osage
woman named Mary. There is no record of an earlier marriage ceremony in
Kansas. The progress of the mission was slow. Rev: Father John
Schoenmakers, S. J., arrived at the mission April 28, 1847, accompanied by
Fathers Bax and Colleton. They were accorded possession of two buildings
then being erected by the Indian Department. In these buildings were
started two schools—one for girls and one for boys. In October a number of
Sisters of Loretto arrived from Kentucky.
Father Paul Ponziglioni came to the mission in 1851. The work went
forward with energy from that time. Additions were made to the buildings,
and attendance increased. The Civil War scattered the Osages, but Father
Ponziglioni followed from village to village to minister to them.
The Osages disposed of their vast domain in Kansas in
1825. In June of that year they made a treaty with the United States by
which they ceded all the land of the State of Kansas south of the land
ceded by the Kansas. The Osages and Kansas were, in fact, in St. Louis
together to conclude these treaties. That with the Osages was made on the
second of June, and that with the Kansas the following day. The south
limit of the Kansas cession has been already noted. The Osage cession
extended from that line south into Oklahoma and west as far as the Kansas
had claimed. It was an imperial domain, and the Osages had no good title
to any great portion of it. The Government could take title from the
Osages; none could ever dispute this title with the United States. That is
why it was accepted from the Osages.
In this same treaty a new reservation was cut from the
ceded lands for the Osages. Its bounds were to be arrived at in much the
same manner as in the new reservation for the Kansas. This new Osage
reservation was thus defined:
“Beginning at a point due east of White Hair's village
and 25 miles West of the western boundary line of the State of Missouri,
fronting on a North and South Line so as to leave 10 miles North and 40
miles South of the point of said beginning, and extending West with a
width of 50 miles to the western boundary of the lands hereby ceded and
relinquished.”
All this reservation was
disposed of under the terms of a treaty made with the Osages at the
Canville Trading Post, near Shaw, in Neosho County, September 29, 1865. By
this treaty the Ceded Lands were cut from the east end of the reservation
to be sold to create a fund for the benefit of the Osages. This tract was
twenty-eight miles in width—east and west—by fifty miles north and south.
Another cession made by the treaty was a tract twenty miles wide off the
north side of the reservation as it remained after taking off the Ceded
Lands. This tract was to he held in trust for the tribe and sold for its
benefit at a stipulated sum. It was provided also that if the Osages
should determine to move to the Indian Territory to lands secured for them
there, the diminished reservation in Kansas might be sold by the
Government for their benefit. They did so determine, and by an act of
Congress of July 15, 1870, the remainder of the Osage lands in Kansas
passed to the Government to be disposed of for their use. The Osages left
Kansas in 1870. They settled on land bought from the Cherokee, east and
north of the Arkansas River, where they yet live.
