Indians and Rivers by Dr. Bill Worley
Westport Coffeehouse, Kansas City, Missouri, April 2014.

1 Introduction by presenter, William Worley, Ph.d.

2 Sources for Native American Toponymns

When we wonder about the names, Missouri, or Kansas, what do we mean? More to the point, what did those words mean when they were applied to cities, rivers, and states of the United States of America? Why do we call the Missouri River by a tribe's name (as transliterated to the French, and from there, to the English) ?

Rivers provided an active meeting place, for travelers near or far. In this way, we see how rivers are not only boundaries. For the original inhabitants, it is the rivers make that make it possible to connect with others, to transport, and to trade.

3 Rivers, Language, & People: the Big Muddy

Today, we like to think of rivers as boundaries, such as a border for the State of Missouri, for numerous counties, our North-South boundary, and, in the Northwest corner, north of Kansas City, a State boundary. Eastern Missouri is entirely defined by the boundary of the Mississippi. In this way, Europeans would use rivers to define political boundaries and borders.

4 What Rivers May Have Meant to Native Peoples

Rivers were not used as boundaries, they were traveled, however, for commerce, connection, and flow. Rivers give us a means to get somewhere. Impelled by river power, Native Americans could make connections, get things done, and sometimes, go downstream more rapidly.

5 Historians & Maps of the Osage, & Me

One thing to understand about historians is that we are in love with maps. I am more that way than most! This map, an illustration for a book on the Osage, shows particular sites of Osage significance. I like how the map indicates points of rivers and where Indian sites are located on the rivers. American rivers will be named for the Indian tribes; later, the territories and ultimately, the states, will be named for the rivers this way.?

6 Native Americans along the Missouri River

This evening we will learn about a hierarchy of influence among Indian tribes who settled here, in our part of North America. Yet native peoples lived here from before the time of Christ, 2000 or more years ago. More recently, in the Line Creek area, we have evidence of human habitation, but the folks here, when Europeans made contact in the early 1700’s, these long-term residents were the Missouri, the Osage, and the Kansa.

7 Pronunciation of Transliterated Names

From everything we can understand, the Missouri were also known as the Missouria. Do you know we have a state question in Missouri: How do you pronounce the name of the state? Is it Missouri or Missoura?

If we look at the name of the Indian tribe, especially the French approximation of it, the question is answered: It is either one. It is "Missouri Indians" or we can say, the "Missouria." These people arrive here around 1400. They had lived further to the east, perhaps as far north as the Great Lakes, or they may have moved from further south. Traditions indicate the Missouri were pushed west by the Iroquois, a Confederacy of tribes, usually associated with upstate New York, a group with extensive influence.

8 Iroquois Confederacy, Wyandottes, & Lake Huron

Iroquois are significant for another thing. Europeans excluded one member, The Huron, of the Iroquois Confederacy, later. This excluded member group were called the Hurons, although those in the tribe called themselves, the "Wyandottes." So the Wyandottes and the Hurons refer to the same group of people, who were pushed out, into today's Michigan and Canada, around the Great Lake named after them: Lake Huron.

9 Kansas, Missourian, & Dhegihan Sioux

In the 1700's, the Huron, or Wyandottes, move into Kansas. They wind up very close to areas where Missouri were pushed. The Missouria language, a Sioux language, as all the tribes described this evening, are Sioux language speakers. Specifically, the Missouria are Chowari Sioux in their language, a dialect related to the Lakota Sioux, a tribe located further up the Missouri River. Also a language dialect, it is related to Dhegihan Sioux: the language spoken by the Osage, the Kansa, the Omaha, the Ponka, and the Quapaw.

10 A Great Language Group: Kinship

How are these languages related to each other? The Osage and the Kansa languages are about as similar as Spanish and French. Speakers could understand each other to a great extent. With a similar vocabulary, a similar sentence structure, but different sounds, different pronunciations. Over time, different, newer words, for new experiences, would take root, but speakers of these languages could generally make themselves understood by each other.

Now the Missouria are met by the Osage and the Kansa, in the late 1400s, as we look at the Wabash River Valley in Indiana and adjacent areas. Again, evidence shows the westward push--another round of expansion by the Iroquois. This time is before any European impact, the 1400's. Columbus arrives at the end of that century, with European contact confined to the Atlantic coast through the next century, until actual settlement.

When the the Osage and the Kansa arrive and meet the Missouria, they speak in the same language, but the languages differ enough to widen the linguistic gulf, from the difference between French and Spanish, originally, to languages as distinct as French and German: while a word or two might sound alike, most of the language is very different.

11 Indo-European Languages, Differences, & Religious Similarities

French and German are Indo-European languages, like English, Dutch, and Romanian. But French and German differ greatly. As a result of the difference in languages, speakers of the Osage and the Kansa languages did not necessarily view the Missouria as compatible with them.

However, the Kansa and the Osage viewed each other as close relatives. Indeed, when the Kansa and the Osage move west, arriving in the Kansas City area, they are closely related religiously, sharing similar beliefs. The beliefs of the Missouria, however, are distinct from the Kansa and the Osage. The Osage were most numerous of these groups.

12 Along the Missouri River: A Map of the Range of the Osage

This map shows the Missouri river sites where the little Osage, the great Osage, and the Osage are present. Today this area is now called Oklahoma and Arkansas. Overall, the range of the Osage, during the the 1700's (while Europeans are busy fighting the American Revolution and the French and Indian War, taking place far to the east, with effects rippling westward). When the French and French traders, arrive in the early 1700s, they encounter the Osage in this area, an oddly shaped oval.

13 Further Along on the Missouri: The Missouri Indians

With some imagination here, we can see the main river named as we move across what is today Missouri, for one of the three Native American groups along the Missouri, actually the tribe eldest of the Missouri tribes. This happened because the French encounter the Missouri further downstream, naming the larger river after the Missouri, even though they are not the largest tribe.

14 The Osage River

When the French come to the Osage River, they follow it upstream, meeting the great Osage, whose main villages are what today is southeast of Nevada, Missouri, on the Osage River. That is why the river is named for the Osage.

15 Range of the Kansa: A Map

Next, as the French continue west, moving further up the Missouri, they meet the Kansa Indians, with the Kansas River respectfully named after the Kansas tribe.

Names like Missouri and Kansa wind up as territorial and state names much later. This map shows the range of the Kansa, taken from a history of the Kansas Indians, written by William Unrue, retired professor from Wichita State University. He has a broad, inclusive idea about the range of the Kansa before European contact, in the early 1700s. Unrue extends this range both further north, into present day Iowa, and across the Kansas plains, along the Smokey Hill, and the Republican River. These waterways help to form the Kansas River, with that name applied, beginning at Junction City, Kansas, to move further east later on, where the name is used.

16 Kansa & Osage Range Overlaps: A Map

We see that the range of the Kansa Indians is wide, which is true for the Osage, as well: the Osage show their presence throughout a wide area. The overlaps of these ranges are important for Indians and trade.

In this map, especially in the Ozarks area, the Osage had control, and the Ozarks were a much richer area for minerals, among other things. Minerals were used for trade goods, decoration, for animals, for pelts, and furs. They could be used for clothing, for decoration, and for meat purposes.?

17 Western Ranges

The Missouria, the Kansa, and the Osage all engaged in buffalo hunts. The range of this major summer activity extends into the western area. The Osage work from central to western Kansas, by today’s boundaries. Note that the Kansa, slightly further north, are doing the same kind of thing. The Missouria, by the time the Osage and Kansa are fully developed into the 1700's, are in full contact with the French, and the Missouria have, essentially, lost out. The Missouria would move northwest, to unite with very close language relatives: the Oto, where Nebraska is today.

18 The Missouri & The Oto

In the early 1800's, as Lewis and Clark are making their way up the Missouri River, to explore its headwaters, the first Indians they meet after St. Louis, actually live and sustain themselves along the Missouri River: the Missouria Indians. They meet each other in the region we know as Nebraska. This is where the Missouri and the Oto had united for survival purposes.

19 Native American Trade 1700s: Map

Staying with this map, we can see how trade customs change, as European influence encroaches on the various tribes who have engaged in a different kind of trade than developed during European, especially French, rule, during the 1700's.

Questions & Answers

Question:
"I have kind of a John Wayne/Kevin Costner understanding of Indians"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"Well, now those are two different points of view."

Question:
"No, they're pretty much the same. Did they - When you say they were moved, or, were there battles where they're in between different tribes - What made certain tribes want to move south? What did they do to make them do that?"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"The simple answer is yes. Ok, in the pre-European period, the way I can best understand it is, that what you had - is you had, ultimately, in what is now the 48 states of the united states something close 500 tribes. Some very small, some quite large. The Osage actually being one of the larger ones in terms of the territory that they were able to defend. But they're actually, in a sense, always bumping up against each other. They do have boundaries that they understand they're going to potentially defend against incursions by other tribes. Now, the evidence is fairly strong that, for example, the Osage and the Kansa, because they're related linguistically and in terms of customs, may have allowed each other, sort of, wiggle room if you will, and this is why we have overlapping territories that are estimated by later historians as far as those two groups are concerned. But in many cases they would have seen themselves as having distinct areas, and yes, there would have been, we might call them, wars. Again, the Indians did not fight wars of extermination. They fought wars for territory and for captives. Those were really the two major things that they were about, but it would be a mistake to think of pre-European contact North America as an entirely peaceful place because it wasn't. You had groups of people bumping up against each other, and sometimes they worked it out without warfare; frequently they did have battles and moving about. In some cases the battles were so severe, the victories in some cases so complete, that indeed they would force a group to move further away so that you don't bump up against that particular group again. In certain cases, like with the Osage and the Kansa and before them even - the Missouria, they're moving quite a distance away - hundreds of miles. This is before we get into U.S. or American policy of Indian removal that is usually associated from the 1820's to the 1850's, and of course the best known or most notorious of all of those would be the trail of tears or the Cherokees. There's a forced removal of the Shawnee into what is today Johnson County over to Shawnee County and to the West in Kansas. The Wyandots were forced to move out of Ohio and Michigan into what is now Kansas. They were one of the last tribes forced to move at that point, and they had adapted, pretty much, to a white way of life - or where I come from - a gringo way of life back in Ohio. Nonetheless, Indian removal policy meant that they had to move to the West to areas assigned by the government. Now, it's not the government, necessarily, that is the instigator of these removals. When we get into the 19th century it tends to be the whites around the area still held by Indians who want that land. So they pushed the government to push the Indians at that point, but pre-contact, it's the Indians pushing the Indians. Does that help? Question back over here."

Question:
"Okay. During the war of extermination, which is in the mid to late 19th century - Which of these tribes, assuming they were still surviving, hooked up with what became to be known as the alliance known as the Great Sioux Nation?"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"None of them. None of these tribes that we're talking about here. Not the Osage, not the Kansa, nor the Missouria became a part of the Lakota or Nakota. There are different tribes that are further up the Missouri River Valley in the Kevin Costner interpretation of American Indian history that become the great Sioux Nation, if you will. They are always separate. It's an interesting kind of phenomena. We tend to think that if they speak a similar language, or are in the same language family, then they ought to be related, and there was certainly that feeling in 19th century America. It's anthropologists, after all, who were figuring out, you know, how these languages relate to each other late in the lifetime of those tribes. But the fact of the matter is they didn't see each other, necessarily, in many cases - as being related. It's not at all clear that the Osage and the Kansa, who did understand that they were related, but it's not at all clear that they saw themselves as being related to the Missouria who spoke a rather different dialect. I mean, think about it. How did the French and the Germans get along in European history in the 19th century? Not too well. I'm reminded of the old Kingston Trio song that has a line in it - something to the affect "The French ate the Germans, the Germans ate the Dutch, and I don't like anybody very much." The reality of the situation is that language similarity did not create cultural connection, always. Sometimes, it seems that the separation between the Osage and the Kansa had been very late, and something that they understood as - that they did have a connection to each other. There's a number of things in the records, what little record we have, that indicate that those two tribes worked together reasonably well. They lived in close proximity to each other. They saw each other as essentially extensions of the same family. We might even say, "As cousins." That's not at all clear that they had the same view of the Missouria or the Oto. The Oto and the Missouria saw each other as cousins, and they were very closely connected language wise, but not with their more distant language cousins - the Sioux speaking Osage and Kansa."

Question:
"So in this case it was a lack of interest and affinity as opposed to a lack of opportunity to join the larger confederation?"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"The Indians, generally - and by the way, I use the term Indian or American Indian because I've done a fair amount of research, especially with one branch of the Cherokee, and it's very interesting that among themselves they'll accept the use of Native American, but they really prefer Indian. They talk about living in Indian country. So you will hear me talking more about Indians and Indian country and American Indians than Native Americans. But in this particular case, the various Indian tribes did not see, generally, an advantage to alliance. There are very few instances where you have tribes gathering together. The Iroquois Confederacy of upstate New York is one of the few instances where you had that kind of thing occurring, and that is a language connection - a close language connection that makes that happen. Iroquois is the name of a language. It's not the name of a tribe in that respect, but they did ally themselves together. Very seldom do you have that kind of thing happened elsewhere, and indeed there's a tremendous amount of resistance to it. Even the Kansa and the Osage did not align themselves for, shall we say, warfare purposes according to any record that I've run across. They would hunt cooperatively at times, they would trade cooperatively at times, and they would allow each other, in a sense, to live in fairly close proximity of each other without biting each other's head off. On the other hand, they don't form either a defensive or an offensive alliance with each other. Out in the Southwest where I came from and grew up, the Pueblo Indians - We tend to think of them as one tribe, and trust me, every one of those is very separate from the other, and they have a history of warfare with each other even in fairly close proximity. Even though, in terms of custom, they're very similar. Language wise they can be quite different. The tendency in American Indian culture is to live independently divided, not cooperatively and united. Yes? Ma'am back over here, yeah, and then we'll get back over here."

Question:
"Thank you. What you said earlier interested me because my Grandmother, in Gasconade County, said that there were Indians living in Gasconade County in her mother's lifetime, you know. My Grandmother was born in 1887 and there were Indians, and so my question was; would that been just like a few people hanging on and not like a tribal community type environment? Then my second question is - I wondered about the Indian mounds, they called them in that area, the stone circles, and tent mounds - When would they have been built? Could that have been as little as, you know, 150 years ago or very ancient?"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"No, the mounds go back - They're not very ancient - not, you know, 2000-3000 years ago, but mound building is what dates from around, give or take, 800-1000 A.D. or Common Era C.E. depending on how you like to divide the time. In this particular case, the site at Cahokia, which is across the river from St. Louis, is probably the largest mound building site, and that dates from around that time - 800-1000 A.D. There was a community of probably 40,000-50,000 people living there at one particular point in that area. You had outlined communities that connected with the center that would have been at Cahokia. So the kind of area that you talk about and you're describing in Gasconade County would have been of that sort - but in the late 19th century or early 20th century folks who would have been Indians living in central Missouri would not have been a part of any organized tribe in that area. They would have potentially had an identification of themselves as Indians, and their neighbors would have possibly understood them as Indians, but they were not connected with any particular tribe. As you know may know, the state of Missouri does not have any Indian reservations in it today. That's because of the treaties, such as the ones that William Clark negotiated, that consecutively beginning in 1808 and then 1825 basically excluded all of the tribes - not just the Osage and the Kansa - but other tribes, the Iowa and the Sac and Fox. Their tribal titles are extinguished with the Platte Purchase. That's what the Platte Purchase is about, is to end Indian titles to Northwestern Missouri, and they have to move across the river. Today, there is Iowa reservation and a Sac and Fox reservation that is immediately adjacent to the Missouri River right where Kansas runs into Nebraska. There are two separate reservations. One for the Sac and Fox, which is a combined tribe; one for the Iowa, which is separate. Then further to the South and West, you have a Kickapoo and a Potawatomi reservation that still exists in the state of Kansas. Then as you go further West there are quite a few Indian reservation areas. Further East there are very few. There is a small Cherokee reservation that still exists in the Smoky Hill - Smoky Mountain area of extreme Western North Carolina. There is a town of Cherokee in North Carolina that is in fact the site of that reservation, and there are a few other small reservations East in Mississippi. Generally, you have to work your way West and especially into states like New Mexico and Arizona where you will find numerous Indian reservations, but the state of Kansas does have four existing Indian reservations in 2014. The Iowa, the Sac and Fox, the Potawatomi, and the Kickapoo - and the Potawatomi are the (15:11). There are other bands of the Potawatomi that do not have reservation rights in Kansas. Other questions."

Question:
"Yes. I have a general question. Do the Indians have written language, and if they're scarce, how do you date of site tribes from the - say 1500-1600's on to present."

Dr. Bill Worley:
"Well, what we have to do in terms of the 1500-1600's area, which is pre-European contact. That has to be done essentially through the oral tradition of the tribe, and that's often not written down until at least the 19th century when there began to be a kind of academic interest in doing that. There's been quite a bit of effort in the 20th and now into the 21st century to try to preserve that, but I mentioned earlier that there were as many as 500 tribes in what is now the United States not including Alaska and Hawaii. If you include Alaska, then you've got lots more. In the case of those instances, most of the languages of those tribes - there's not a living person that speaks that language. In other words, the language is essentially a dead language. In certain cases there were efforts. The most well-known of these would be with the Cherokee language that Sequoia developed a phonetic alphabet to relate the language and the sounds that he heard. He had developed then an alphabet from that that he called a syllabary. So there is a written Cherokee language as well as a spoken Cherokee language, and there are in fact people living in Northeastern Oklahoma in 2014 who only speak Cherokee. They do not speak English. They might understand a little English, but they're not confident English speakers. They lived that remotely in a couple or three counties of Northeastern Oklahoma that were at one time part of what was known as the Cherokee Nation. You have some native language speakers in a number of other areas. Probably the largest number would be among the Navaho, which is also, numerically, the largest Indian tribe in the United States. There are over a quarter of a million Navaho - members of the Navaho tribe who are of significant blood amounts. Indian's compare themselves by using what's known as the CDB card from the (18:03_____) Indian Affairs Certificate of Blood is what they go to, and you know, are you a quarter? Are you a half? Are you 1/1000th? You know, however that works. But many languages have completely disappears. So what happens is that it's a later interpretation or remembrance of what the tradition of the tribe ways, and sadly, in a lot of cases, we really don't have any records. One of the states that had the most diverse life and the largest number of tribes in it was California; and today there's hardly any surviving evidence of American Indian life in California. It's very very limited in that, but it was, at one time, one of the most diverse as far as numbers of tribes, numbers of languages, and that sort of thing. There's a question in the back."

Question:
"Professor Worley, could you expand on the term of slavery within the Indian community? Can you compare it, possibly, to the chattel property concept of slavery between White and Black slaves."

Dr. Bill Worley:
"Right. It's actually a fairly different kind of situation. The trading of slaves was, well and the acquisition of slaves, was usually for a couple of purposes. But the most important one, most frequently, was to actually build your tribe, your group. Okay? So the acquisition of slaves who were, by definition, of another tribe was most frequently to add to your particular group. Obviously, women were attractive as slaves in that respect, but there's almost no indication that there is a buying and selling of slaves in anything like the chattel slavery that developed in the Americas with the coming of the Europeans. It's a very different kind of thing. Different in two ways. Number 1 - No indication that in Indian slavery that the status of being a slave is something that in inherited from parent to child. That didn't happen. If a child is born, the child belongs to the parent, but the child is not considered to be a slave as such. Now, most frequently, what happened was by the time children are born the parent had been adopted into the tribe. So they're effectively already there. The other part of that - You don't have the, you know, the inherited status in that respect, and additionally it is not something that continues for generations. It usually - It was very seldom, from what we can understand at least, for a person to remain in a slave status among American Indians for more than a few years at most. Because again, the primary purpose is to build your own group. So you're generally pulling them in, but of course you see there is, because there was a desire of others to add to their group. Then, you had raids that resulted in this. By the way, this is actually somewhat similar to what we can understand was the slavery situation within Africa itself. In other words, most of the slaves who are ultimately sold to Europeans at the coast are acquired through warfare. Now, overtime that warfare becomes for the express purpose of acquiring slaves, and then moving them from one group to the other. You may or may not be aware of the fact that Africa is an even more ethnically diverse place than North America was in regard to the American Indians. We had roughly 500 ethnic groups or tribes of Indians in what is now the United States. On the African continent there are well over 1,000 ethnic group, different languages, different religions, and they understood themselves to be just as different as any Indian tribe did from another Indian tribe here in the United States, but it's not the same as chattel slavery at all. I hope that's helpful. I had a follow-up to the slavery question. A lot of Indians had Black slaves. Later on. I wouldn't say a lot, but some did especially in the South."

Question:
"Well the Kansas volunteers, one of the first battles in Kansas, the fellow Jim (23:09_____) killer, an Indian, had a batch of slaves that both he and them joined the Kansas volunteers, and he happened to be their sergeant. I know that's -"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"No, it's quite true that - and this would be especially among the southern tribes, which would be, and this is one of the interesting ironies of American History, we refer to the southern tribes, usually, as the five civilized tribes. Okay? The Chocktaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Cherokees are what's called the five civilized tribes. One of the things you may not have thought about is why are they the civilized tribes? Well we usually assume that that means that they were more educated etcetera. What it really meant for southern Whites is they were civilized because some of them owned slaves, and if they own slaves then that made them civilized. Just think about that one for a minute. There are obvious contradictions in lots of different things, that being one of them. "

Question:
"Could you just go over interbreeding with Indians and Black slaves?"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"Yes, this happened certainly. It had happened - One of the things is that early in English settlement especially where there were slaves held by Whites, if the slaves could escape the best place for them to go frankly, at that time, was among the Indians, and yes there would be, we would say, marriages, sexual contact, children that would result, and so it's not a huge number by any means, but there is a significant inter-marriage by, we would say, runaway slaves and American Indians that take place in the 18th and 19th centuries in the American South especially. Now, there's a separate question that some of you may be aware of that's called the freedman question with regard to the same five civilized tribes, and that is again - These were in the instances where there were slaves owned by Indians at the end of the civil war, and of course the slaves then had been freed. Congress passed a law that required, in the Cherokee, Chocktaw, Chickasaw, Seminoles, and Creek tribes or nations that they had to accept the former slaves as members of the tribe. Now there's a very basic reason for that, and that is that the - What congress was trying to do was to minimize the number of folks for whom there might have to be services provided, and if you could get, you know, a portion of the former slaves categorized as Indians then you could provide them with separate services than what you might be doing through the Freedman's Bureau or other services elsewhere in the South and actually, generally, supply them with less services. Now the problem with this is that now, in the 21st century, this becomes a very controversial thing among many of these particular tribes, and especially among the largest of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. They have been attempting, over the last couple of decades, to basically define the freedmen as not members of the tribe and having no benefits whatsoever. Part of that's become - happened because the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has a number of casinos that are producing a good amount of revenue, and they don't want to share that revenue with the descendants of the former slaves, the children and the grandchildren of the freemen. So there is a whole series of court cases about that particular issue, and the same question does exist among the Chickasaws and Chocktaws especially. The Seminole Nation, while have some presence in Oklahoma, is actually incorporated in the state of Florida, which is where a lot of the Seminoles stayed rather than being - They managed to evade removal back in the 1840's as a result of the Seminole wars that you may be familiar with there. Other questions or comments."

Question:
"Just one. You talked about the rivalries between tribes and skirmishes, but no real heavy wars, and then here comes the Europeans, the Spaniards, and the French in particular to start with before the Lewis and Clark, and them taking advantage of some of these rivalries and basically creating alliances with the Indians to basically expand their fur trading territories. Some of them we'd heard a couple years ago about - a presentation about the Missouria Indians, and I can't remember what the tribes were. It was the Sioux, or the Sac fox, or the Osage basically pitting them against the Missouria and being the beginning of their dissemination and then they're moving to Nebraska with the Oto."

Dr. Bill Worley:
"Well, with regard to the Osage I mentioned before that they were the most numerous and the most influential. They managed to control major portions of, what is today, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and there was no other tribe in this region that managed for a period of time. The Osage controlled that area from, best we can understand, the last 1600's into the late 1800's. They began to lose control just about the time that the U.S. begins to come into the picture, and so we see them diminishing in influence at that point. But the Osage, what they were able to do, because they had significant influence at least over such a wide area - at the southwestern corner of that area, they could obtain horses from the Kiowa and Comanche who had obtained them from the Spanish, possibly by stealing them or however. So the Osage, fairly early on in the 1600's, had horses coming from that direction. They also, in their northeastern area in Missouri, had contact obviously with the French traders, and the French were very willing to trade firearms for furs in this area. And because the Osage had control of the Ozarks area in Southwestern Missouri today, Northwestern Arkansas, and Northeastern Oklahoma, a tremendous fur-bearing animal area at that time. They were in a good position to engage in that trade with the French. And so what happens is that the Osage, this is one of the reasons they become as influential as they do throughout the 1700's, they have horses, and generally speaking, the French and later the English are very reluctant to do much trading of horses with the Indians to the East of them, and the Spanish are very much against allowing guns as trade items with the tribes that they control to the southwest. So the Osage have horses they get from the southwest, they have guns they get from the northeast, and they managed to spread those among their bands that are, you know, scattered out across this territory, and it puts them in a superior military position for about 100 years, which is not an insignificant amount of time. That makes them better traders. They have more, you know, stuff to work from. Now what that means, however, is that they are bumping off moving elsewhere tribes that seem to be in competition with them, and the Missouria certainly would fall into that category, and it seems that it's in the later 18th century that the Osage are basically able to push the Missouria up the Missouri River to where they join with the Oto, which are their close language relatives. And even today the Missouria and Oto are considered to be a combined tribe like the Sac and Fox are from that standpoint. The Kansa seem to have functioned as an auxiliary to the Osage in terms of this, and they too seem to have had both horses and guns. What the Kansas didn't have was the Ozarks. They were - They had access to the buffalo plains, but they didn't have access to the smaller fur-bearing animals of the Ozarks, because the Osage made sure that that was their territory, and they defended that strongly. But this all begins to come apart as we get into the 19th century. There's a battle that takes place up around, what is today, Smithville Lake north of the river. While Louis and Clark, they've passed through going west, they have not back this way; there is a decisive battle between the Iowa Indians and the Osage, and it's won by the Iowas. From that point on the Osage are basically pushed back down to well south of the Missouri River, except right around Fort Osage itself, and that's primarily the Little Osage that are coming from central Missouri. But the Great Osage are no longer able to defend and exploit Northwestern Missouri, and the Kansas, by the way, moved farther west along the Kansas river over to about Manhattan, where they had villages after that time. So that's - There is this movement that occurred within the tribes before the Europeans, but then it becomes much more exaggerated and more fatal, frankly, after the Europeans come in and you get, you know, the addition of firearms, and horses, and things of that sort. Does that answer your question?"

Question:
"Yeah, yeah, and it actually - You start out with all of the tribes having the rivers as their main transportation corridors and their main connections to each other, and then with the introduction of horses, and the tribe that has the horses and has the more flexible transportation means ends up taking over."

Dr. Bill Worley:
"Yeah, for a period of time, and then of course they get replaced by the gringos, if you will."

Question:
"Who had it all."

Dr. Bill Worley:
"It seems so, yeah."

Question:
"My question is concerning, I guess, what the motivation was when you said they signed the treaties with Clark. If they weren't forced or felt like they'd been dealt bad with the first time, why did they sign the second one? What was their motivation both times?"

Dr. Bill Worley:
"It appears in both cases. In the first case in 1808 they had just suffered the defeat with the Iowa, and what is significant - Fort Osage - the Osage that gathered around and traded there seemed to have been a part of what's known as the Little Osage band. The larger Osage gathering was one down by Nevada known as the Great Osage or the Big Osage - In French it's Le Petit Osage and the Grand Osage, big and little, but it has to do more with numbers of people in this. But the reality is that in both cases, in 1808 and then again in 1825, it's a recognition that they can't resist what the situation is. In 1808 they realized - the Osage realized they can no longer resist the incursion of the Iowas coming down from the north. By 1825 what they can't resist is the expansion of the gringos across the state. The Whites moving from St. Louis to Jackson County, in essence. Jackson County is actually formed officially in December of 1825 after that treaty is signed. The Osage haven't left yet, but it's now officially opened to White settlement and then independence is established as the county seat in I believe that's by March of 1826 that it's designated as the county seat. The motivation in both cases is to get the best deal we can, because we've lost out one way or another at that point. So the Osage are essentially in decline in terms of their influence by the time we get into the very first part of the 19th century. Thanks very much. I'll be glad to visit with you individually here afterwards. "