The loyal Osage were of great service to Kansas and the Union
cause, as they held the frontier against the Cheyennes and
Arapahoes and gave assistance to the Union troops at Fort Gibson
and Fort Scott. It was to them the loyal Creeks under
Apothlayola[01]
fled when driven north by Stand Watie.[02]
Long Pole, a Little Osage, performed one service that brought a
letter of thanks from President Lincoln and the War Department.
He carried on foot, an important dispatch from the commander of a
small body of troops stationed at Osage Mission to Fort Scott,
fifty miles away, and returned with the reply in twenty-four
hours.
During the entire period of the war the Osage contributed much to
the peace and protection of Kansas, but they received slight
gratitude in return.
The Land Troubles
The war had scarcely ended when the people of Kansas began to look
with covetous eyes towaqrd the Osage lands. A great cry went
up to “drive the Indians out of Kansas.” It was the same
cry and inspired by the same spirit that drove the Cherokees out
of Georgia. As a sample of what the Osage received in the
movement, the following from the Erie, Kansas, Record is
reprinted:
Crowding the Indian
“Shoot the half-breed renegade and I will pardon you before the
smoke gets away from the end of your gun,” was the advice of
Governor Samuel J. Crawford to Theodore Reynolds when informed of
the trouble Reynolds was having with Augustus Captain, a
half-breed Osage Indian, over a claim.
This drastic advice was given in the office of the old Erie Hotel
in Erie in the latter part of the 60’s and Judge J. A. Wells,
who was proprietor of the Erie Hotel at that time says he
remembers its occurrence as well as if it happened yesterday.
He says the scene was a dramatic one, the governor of the state
being surrounded by a party of earnest and honest
frontiersmen—most of whom had seen service in the Civil
war—listening to the stories of the troubles of some of these
men who had come to Kansas and taken claims only to have them
claimed by half-breeds and squawmen.[03]
This incident was one of the interesting early happenings in
Neosho county was [sic] revived by C. C. Dutton recently
purchasing an 80-acre tract of land three miles south of Erie.
In the treaty of the United States government with the Osage
Indians in the purchase of their lands in this county it was
stipulated that not to exceed twenty-five half-breed Indians
should be allowed to select as head-rights the north eighty acres
of any quarter section upon which they had improvements.
Certain chiefs of the Great and Little Osages were named to make
these selections and the eighty acres recently purchased by Mr.
Dutton was set off to one Peter Chouteau, a half-breed, and the
United States government issued him a patent for the same.
And here is where the fireworks began. It was at the close
of the great Civil war and the ex-Union soldiers were coming to
the land of promise, Kansas, in the same spirit in which they had
answered the call of Abraham Lincoln. Among that number that
came to Neosho county was Theodore Reynolds. He admired the
eighty acres that Augustus Captain was claiming as his head-right
and proceeded to “jump” the same. His comrades in arms
said he should have the half-breed’s claim, that the half-breed
had been a Southern sympathizer and even charged him with
appropriating the settlers’ horses and cattle—they did not
call it stealing in those days.
The settlers made it so warm for Augustus Captain, the half-breed,
that he moved on down to the Indian Territory, but he brought suit
for the possession of his head-right. While public sentiment
was in favor of Theodore Reynolds, it could not set aside a patent
of the United States government and the half-breed, Augustus
Captain, was given the land in a decision by the courts sustaining
the granting of the patent.
It was one of the hardest fought legal battles ever tried in
Neosho county. Judge L. Stillwell, now deputy commissioner
of pensions at Washington, and his then law partner, Judge Bayless,
now a millionaire attorney in Chicago, were the attorneys for
Theodore Reynolds and Judson & Chase and Carwile & Moffitt
were the attorneys for Augustus Captain.
In later years, after the Osage became a wealthy tribe,
ex-governor Crawford passes as a friend and benefactor and secured
some handsome attorney’s fees from them.
Congressman Sidney Clark was another Kansas official who passed as
a benefactor of the Osage, but it is well known that he secretly
supported the Sturgis treaty until pressure by the people of his
state, who sought homes on the Osage reserve, showed him that the
disreputable treaty would fail and then he got over on the winning
side and exposed the machinations of Sturgis and Joy,[04]
very much to the disgust of his former associates in the deal.
[The newspaper account presumably ends at this point.]
Dealing in Reservations
Many years prior to the opening of the territory of Kansas for
settlement, it had been the policy of the government, in treating
with the Indian tribes in the more settled sections of the
country, to give the Indians the privilege of selecting for
themselves reservations in the uninhabited portions of the West.
As a result of this policy, a number of Indian tribes in quest of
new homes, with fair hunting grounds, and soil capable of
producing maize with scarcely any labor, were induced to cross the
Missouri and fix their abode in what became know as the Indian
Territory, a portion of which is now Kansas, a land of genial
climate and undulating surface, where the buffalo roamed in
countless herds, and the deer, the wild turkey, the prairie
chicken and the quail were always within reach of the hunters’
arrow. These immigrant Indians were given land carved out of
the domain which the government had acquired by purchase from the
Osage and the Kansas or Kaw tribes, who were the primitive
occupants of all the Kansas region, there still being left large
areas to the Osage and the Kaws.
Among the tribes thus transferred west of the Missouri were the
Iowas, the Kickapoos, the Delawares, the Cherokees, the
Pottawatomies, the Sacs and Foxes, the Ottawas, the Shawnees, the
Wyandottes, and the Miamis. The reservation selected
embraced the choicest portions of the territory, abounding in
fertile valleys and timber lands, which the Indian, as if by
instinct, always selected for his wigwam.
On the opening of Kansas to settlement by white people in May,
1854, flood tide of immigration poured in from the north and the
south, on one hand to make Kansas a free state, and the other to
extend and perpetuate the domain of American slavery. Owing
to this fierce political conflict, the territory became settled
more rapidly than had ever been experienced before in the
settlement of unoccupied lands on the frontiers of the West.
On the admission of the state in January, 1861, nearly every
Indian reservation within the limits of Kansas was surrounded by
white settlers. The necessity therefore arose for further
negotiations with the Indian tribes, one by one, to induce them to
exchange their reservations in Kansas for lands in the Indian
Territory. Gradually the Kansas reservations were alienated,
and the Indians, tribe after tribe, receded to the south, beyond
the boundaries of the state.
An additional provision in the Osage treaty of 1824 deserves at
least a passing notice because it created a “buffer state”
between Missouri and the reservation. The object was to
prevent hostile incursions of one race upon the other. It
cannot be said, however, that the land was absolutely surrendered
to the federal government. It was simply neutralized, and
the Osage retained a nominal interest in it by establishing a
half-breed settlement between Canville Trading Post and Flat Rock
creek. This was in accordance with a clause of the treaty
which had set aside forty-two sections of land on the Neosho and
Marais des Cynges rivers.
About 1825 some wandering Cherokees, an advance guard, so to
speak, of the banished tribe, settled in the south-eastern corner
of the “buffer state,” and in 1836, the federal government
having extinguished the Osage half-breed title, sold the whole of
it to the Cherokees from Georgia. Henceforth it was called,
very appropriately, the Cherokee neutral lands.
The Osage and Cherokees were apparently pretty well out of the
reach of the very early settlers in Kansas. In 1867 the
Osage consented to a division of their reservation, and four
distinct tracts were laid off. The ceded lands, being those
that passed directly to the federal government for $300,000,
comprised a strip thirty by fifty miles in extent, lying
immediately west of the Cherokee neutral lands. The trust
lands extended along the northern part of the Indian Territory
throughout its entire length. The deeded lands were sections
that had been usurped by settlers, and squatters at a minimum
price of a dollar and a quarter an acre. The diminished
reserve comprehended all that was left.
Grafting in Reservations
In 1868 another attempt was made to secure land from the Osage.
The result was the notorious Sturgis treaty or treaty of Drum
creek, which emphasized the settlers’ grievance that Indian
land, instead of becoming public domain, passed to corporations.
Constitutionally this was an invasion of the powers of Congress,
because it anticipated and blocked the power of the legislative
branch over the territory of the United States. Colonel
Taylor, the commissioner sent out from Washington allowed Wm.
Sturgis, president of the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston
railroad to be the controlling spirit, inducing the Osage to sell
their entire diminished reservation, estimated to contain upward
of nine million acres, to the company which he represented, at an
average price of eighteen cents an acre. Col. Taylor,
instead of representing the government, assisted a corporation to
make a treaty for this great body of land.
No sooner were the people informed of the purport of the treaty,
than indignation meetings were held in different parts of the
state, to remonstrate with the United States senate and the
president against the ratification of the treaty. The state
officers of Kansas held a special meeting and requested the
attorney general of the state, the late Col. George H. Hoyt, to
proceed to Washington forthwith, and endeavor to prevent, if
possible, the ratification of the treaty. A number of
circular letters in the form of remonstrances, were addressed
senators and representatives in congress, setting forth the
obnoxious features of the treaty, in attempting to secure to one
man, representing one railway company, nearly one-fourth the
available soil of Kansas, and that for the pittance of 18 cents
per acre, and on the conditions simply of building 100 miles of
road, at the rate of 20 miles a year, without a single acre
reserved for the state, and with no recognition of t he rights of
the people to such an immense area of the public domain. To
aid in defeating the ratification, the superintendent of public
instruction also went to Washington.
Prior to the admission of Kansas into the Union, the policy of the
government in the extinguishment of Indian titles had been to
purchase the Indian reservation outright. In that case, the
reservations reverted directly to the government, and the law
governing public lands obtained. But later, companies and
combinations, by urging their measures day and night in the
lobbies of Congress, ostensibly on the plea of public interests,
but really through motives of personal gain, managed to secure for
themselves, and on their terms, nearly all the Indian reservations
and trust lands in Kansas, and in some of the other newer states.
Only a few in congress, and those chiefly from the frontier West,
were aware of the vast public interests thus alienated in
executive session of the Senate, and often by a simple vote of a
mere quorum. The opposition to the ratification of the Osage
treaty was the first note of alarm, and the facts involved needed
only to be stated to incur a general condemnation.
The bad policy of the government in granting lands to railways was
shown in a short time. The railway promoting era during and
following the civil war led everybody to look lightly on Indian
titles. Congress, by the act of March 3, 1863, had granted
lands to the state of Kansas to aid in building railroads.
Under formal certificate from the Department of the Interior, the
Governor of Kansas issued patents to the Missouri, Kansas &
Texas Railway Company and the Leavenworth, Lawrence &
Galveston Railway Company, (now the Southern Kansas), as a bonus
for building roads. The railway companies had plainly no
right to the land, and Congress no power to make the grants, and
the governor had no right to issue the patents. The act of
congress provided that each alternate section, within certain
limits, should go to any company building thro’ the state.
These two lines ran so that the grants overlapped on the Ceded
Lands. Each road took its alternate section or sought to do
so. This was a very neat and friendly arrangement between
the railroads, but hard on the poor Osage.
On April 10, 1869, the lower house of congress passed a bill
opening the Osage lands to settlement without treaty. At the
same time the infamous Sturgis treaty was before the senate with
fair prospects of being ratified by that body.
Meanwhile settlers were occupying parts of the trust lands without
any authority, and civil strife between them and the Osage seemed
imminent.
It was in this chaotic state of affairs President Grant found the
Osages, and as usual with Grant, went immediately to the bottom of
the trouble and stopped it by appointing a new agent over them and
withdrawing the Sturgis treaty from the Senate.
(Continued.)[05]
