How the Cows Came Home...as Dinner: The Economic Survival of the Osage Indians Concerning the Development their Grass Leasing Business in the 1870s and 1880s

Abstract

It was a sad song they sang that year as they trampled, grudgingly, out of their Kansas homelands. But this unhappiness was understandable since, for the Osage Nation, the last century was a harrowing history that included ceding nearly eight million acres of their sacred land to the haughty, relentless United States government. Even after their removal from the Sunflower state was completed by the early 1870s, newly appointed Indian agent Cyrus Beede remarked that the Osages were still not "ready to give up their war dance and ... scalping knife;"¹ as if stealing their property was supposed to transform them into more evolved, more 'civilized' human beings.